- AMD’s Athlon Silver 10 is a quietly renamed 2022 Athlon Silver 7120U with two Zen 2 cores and no SMT
- Asus, HP, and Lenovo are selling it in laptops now, some with 4 GB of soldered memory to barely meet Windows 11’s minimum RAM requirement
- Both the Core 3 100U and Core i5-1334U score over four times the Silver’s 95-sample multi-threaded average, making laptops powered by them a no-brainer alternative
AMD’s Athlon Silver 10 seems to be a new-generation CPU targeting budget-conscious consumers who want a modern, entry-level laptop with enough processing power for basic tasks.
Nothing could, however, be further from the truth here; Its own specifications page lists what is a very basic mobile chip, offering two Zen 2 cores, skipping simultaneous multithreading (SMT) and a 15W TDP to go with its 3.5 GHz boost clock, essentially establishing itself as a rebadged Athlon Silver 7120U from 2022.
While the current AI-induced memory, storage, and compute shortage continues unabated, buying an entry-level laptop with only 4GB of soldered RAM in 2026, even if it is presented as a ‘new’ choice by laptop manufacturers, is disingenuous when better Intel-based options exist in the same price range that offer up to four times the multi-threaded performance and twice the RAM as a de facto configuration.
Skipping a rebadged chip from 2022?
AMD’s spec page lists the Athlon Silver 10 with a launch date of October 1, 2025, but no launch event accompanied it. The underlying Zen 2 cores are even older than the Athlon Silver 7120U’s launch date, with the company first unveiling the architecture in 2019, and the performance numbers show it.
Its PassMark score is a low 3,543 on multithreaded workloads, at a time when Intel’s competition in the same price bracket, a Core 3 100U CPU configured with 2 performance and 4 efficient cores, clocks in at nearly four times the speed, with a score of 12,308.
This isn’t a new phenomenon either; the similarly positioned Intel Core i5-1334U, a 2023 chip, offers a similar 12,991 score across its 2 performance and 8 efficient-core configuration.
The performance gap hasn’t stopped manufacturers such as ASUS, Lenovo, and HP from selling Athlon Silver 10 or 7120U laptops, often with as little as 4GB of soldered memory, which allows for no upgrades whatsoever.
While Windows 11 can technically work on the 4GB it prescribes as its absolute minimum, it idles at anywhere between 2.5 and 3GB of memory, leaving very little headroom for applications even as lightweight as a word processor or a browser.
Better alternatives exist in the same price range
The irony is that better alternatives exist and are being sold in the same $350-500 price range as Athlon Silver 10-based laptops currently. Dell offers at least two alternatives, including a 6-core Core 3 100U option under $500 and another just $100 above that, with 4 more cores under the hood. ASUS also offers asimilarly configured and priced option in the same range, though with a smaller SSD than either Dell option.
All of these would be significantly faster than their Athlon Silver 10 alternatives and, perhaps more importantly, offer 8GB of RAM, which should be the absolute minimum, in my opinion, for a laptop, but we do have an in-depth analysis of that question here.
One could argue that calling AMD Athlon Silver 10 laptops e-waste might be a bit too extreme here, but given that more powerful and well-configured alternatives exist that do not slap on CPU cores from 2019 into a rebadged CPU from 2022 that might not even keep up with modern smartphones, it is an easily justifiable position.
These laptops would be short-lived at best and have limited utility at a time when e-waste continues to be an increasingly bigger issue for society: the UN’s Global E-waste Monitor 2024 counted 62 million metric tons of e-waste in 2022, with only 22.3% documented as properly collected and recycled, and found the world’s e-waste “rising five times faster than documented e-waste recycling.”
Buying a laptop that is slower than a modern smartphone when better alternatives exist, despite an AI-led price gouge, and can not be upgraded is simply not only a waste of money but one that is harmful to the environment, even if you can handle the pace of a laptop that offers performance that desktops from over a decade ago would embarrass.
