Intel Celeron N5095A vs AMD Athlon Silver 7120C vs AMD Athlon Gold 7220C

Intel Celeron N5095A

The Celeron N5095A is an inexpensive quad-core SoC of the Jasper Lake product family designed for use in affordable SFF desktops and laptops. It features four Tremont CPU cores running at 2 GHz that Boost to up to 2.9 GHz with no thread-doubling Hyper-Threading technology in sight. A pretty basic iGPU is present as well.

The only difference between the N5095A and the N5095 is that the former comes with support for more proprietary Intel technologies such as the Smart Sound DSP, Wake on Voice and HD Audio.

Architecture and Features

Tremont brings many improvements over Goldmont Plus, the architecture that we know from the N5030 and myriads of other N-class CPUs. An up to 30% boost in single-thread performance is to be expected thanks to smarter prefetchers, branch prediction improvements and other refinements, according to Intel. These new chips are physically larger than their immediate predecessors as a result. Either way, this is still a "small" core rather than a "big" one according to ChipsAndCheese.

The Celeron has 1.5 MB of L2 and 4 MB of L3 cache and is compatible with DDR4-2933 and LPDDR4x-2933 memory or slower. Support for Intel CNVi Wi-Fi 6 modules is baked into the chip, as are 8 PCIe 3.0 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 3.9 GB/s. USB 4 or Thunderbolt aren't supported however.

Please also note that the Celeron gets soldered to the motherboard (BGA1338 socket interface) for good and is thus not user-replaceable.

Performance

While we haven't tested a single system featuring the N5095A as of Sep 2024, we have done several reviews of computers/laptops powered by the N5095. CPU performance should be pretty much identical between the two. Therefore, we fully expect the chip to be about as fast as the Core i3-10110U, Core i3-1005G1, Celeron N5105 and also the Ryzen 3 3200U in multi-threaded workloads. Which is just enough for the most basic of tasks in late 2024.

Performance will get a significant hit if the power target is set to 10 W or 6 W instead of the Intel-recommended 15 W value.

Graphics

The DirectX 12.1-capable 16 EU UHD Graphics runs at up to 750 MHz and is in many respects similar to what Ice Lake CPUs come equipped with. This graphics adapter is capable of driving up to 3 SUHD displays simultaneously; HEVC, AVC, VP9, MPEG-2 and other popular video codecs can all be hardware-decoded. AV1 and VVC can't.

As far as gaming is concerned, it is reasonable to expect playable framerates in really old games (like Dota 2 Reborn) provided one sticks to lower resolutions such as HD 720p.

Power consumption

While most N-class chips have a 6 W long-term power target, the Celeron N5095A has a 15 W TDP to mimic much faster U-class Core processors. This isn't a great CPU for passively cooled designs.

The N5095A is built with the same 10 nm Intel process as Ice Lake-U processors for pretty unimpressive power efficiency, as of late 2024.

AMD Athlon Silver 7120C

Der AMD Athlon Silver 7120C ist ein Mobilprozessor für günstige Chromebooks basierend auf die Mendocino Serie. Er integriert zwei ältere Zen 2 Kerne (wie bei der Ryzen 4000 Mobile Serie) mit 2,4 - 3,5 GHz und nur 2 MB L3 Cache. Auf SMT/Hyperthreading muss die CPU verzichten (daher nur 2 Threads). Der integrierte Speicherkontroller unterstützt Dual-Channel LPDDR5-5500 MHz. Die integrierte Grafikkarte nutzt die aktuelle RDNA 2 Architektur, jedoch nur mit 2 CUs (128 Shader) und taktet im 7220U mit bis zu 1,9 GHz.

Im Vergleich zur schnelleren Ryzen 5 7520C, sind nur zwei CPU-Kerne mit niedrigerer Taktung verbaut. Im Vergleich zum Athlon Gold 7220C, bietet der 7120C weniger Cache, kein SMT und weniger Boost-Takt. Verglichen zum Athlon Silver 7120U für (Windows-) Notebooks bietet der 7120C die selben Spezifikationen.

Der Chip wird im relativ aktuellen 6nm FinFET Prozess bei TSMC gefertigt.

AMD Athlon Gold 7220C

Der AMD Athlon Gold 7220C ist ein Mobilprozessor für günstige Chromebooks basierend auf die Mendocino Serie. Er integriert zwei ältere Zen 2 Kerne (wie bei der Ryzen 4000 Mobile Serie) mit 2,4 - 3,7 GHz und 4 MB L3 Cache. Dank SMT/Hyperthreading können 4 Threads gleichzeitig bearbeitet werden. Der integrierte Speicherkontroller unterstützt Dual-Channel LPDDR5-5500 MHz. Die integrierte Grafikkarte nutzt die aktuelle RDNA 2 Architektur, jedoch nur mit 2 CUs (128 Shader) und taktet im 7220C mit bis zu 1,9 GHz.

Technisch ist der 7220C identisch zum Athlon Gold 7220U für (Windows) Notebooks.

Im Vergleich zur schnelleren Ryzen 5 7520U, sind nur zwei CPU-Kerne mit niedrigerer Taktung verbaut.

Der Chip wird im relativ aktuellen 6nm FinFET Prozess bei TSMC gefertigt.