Asus, Lenovo, and HP are selling cheap AMD Athlon Silver 10 laptops — for your own sake, do not spend your money on inferior e-waste
Two Zen 2 cores, RAM you can't upgrade, and about a quarter of the PassMark score of Intel's budget chips make it a bad bargain no matter how you paint it.
Asus, Lenovo, and HP are currently selling laptops powered by AMD's Athlon Silver 10, a CPU that is essentially a rebadged version of the Athlon Silver 7120U from 2022. This chip offers two Zen 2 cores, lacks simultaneous multithreading, and has a 15W TDP, making it a basic mobile processor designed for entry-level laptops. However, this is not a good choice for consumers.
The Athlon Silver 10 is being sold with as little as 4GB of soldered memory, which barely meets Windows 11's minimum RAM requirement. This configuration is not sufficient for modern computing needs, as better alternatives in the same price range offer up to four times the multi-threaded performance and twice the RAM. Intel's Core 3 100U CPU, for example, scores nearly four times higher than the Athlon Silver 10 and comes with 4 more performance cores.
Even a slightly more powerful Intel Core i5-1334U from 2023 offers a similar score to the Athlon Silver 10. The performance difference is significant, and the Athlon Silver 10 is clearly inferior. Moreover, the Athlon Silver 10's limited memory and lack of upgradeability make it an environmentally harmful choice. The UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024 reported that e-waste has been rising five times faster than recycling, and buying a laptop that is slower than a modern smartphone simply adds to this problem.
Better alternatives with more cores, greater memory, and upgradeability exist in the same price range, making the Athlon Silver 10 a choice that should be avoided.
Written by urgent.news from TechRadar's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
