AMD Athlon II N350 vs Intel Core i3-2377M vs AMD Athlon II P320

AMD Athlon II N350

The AMD Athlon II N350 is an entry to mid range dual core processor for laptops. Compared to the faster Phenom II and Turion II processors of 2010, the Athlon II N350 features only a 64 Bit FPU (Floating Point Unit), and not 128 Bit as the Athlon II Desktop. Therefore, some rumors also indicate that the N350 could still be based on K8 parts.

The Athlon II N350 offers an integrated DDR3-1066 (or 800 according to Wikipedia) dual-channel memory controller and a 1.6 GHz HyperTransport 3.0 link (HT3200) to the chipset.

The performance of the Athlon N350 should be on par with a 2.2 GHz clocked Pentium T4400 processor of 2009. 

Intel Core i3-2377M

The Intel Core i3-2377M is a power efficient ULV (Ultra Low Voltage) processor for thin and light laptops. The base frequency of 1.5 GHz is relatively low and the CPU does not support Turbo Boost for automatic overclocking. Due to HyperThreading, the i7-2377M is able to handle 4 threads in parallel. Compared to similar clocked Celeron and Pentium models, the i3 features the faster HD 3000 graphics card and offers more enabled features (like Quick Sync). However, compared to the expensive i7 CPUs, the i3 lacks VT-d, Trusted Execution and VPro support.

Sandy Bridge is the evolutionary successor of the Arrandale architecture. The most notable improvements is the improved Turbo 2.0 (not used for the processing cores in the i3-2377M) and the integration of the graphics card into the 32nm CPU core.

The integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000 clocked at 350 or 1000 MHz (Turbo Boost). Due to the slower clock rate without the Turbo, compared to HD Graphics 3000 in 35W and 45W processors (usually clocked at 650 MHz base speed in non LV processors), the performance should be noticeable lower.

The performance of the CPU should be a bit higher than a similar clocked Arrandale Core i3 ULV and therefore noticeably faster than the 1.33 GHz Core i3-380UM. The average performance of the CPU part should therefore be similar to the AMD A4-3320M or Turion II M500.

The TDP of 17W (includes the integrated GPU and memory controller) allows the use of the 2377M CPU in small subnotebooks.

AMD Athlon II P320