AMD Athlon II N350 vs Intel Core i7-1260U

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 i7-1260U

The Intel Core i7-1260U is a mobile CPU for thin and light laptops based on the Alder Lake architecture. It was announced in early 2022 and offers 2  performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 12 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 1.1 to 4.7 GHz on the performance cluster and 0.8 to 3.5 GHz on the efficient cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 12 MB L3 cache. The 1260U offers "Enterprise" vPro management features. Compared to the P-series (28W) or H-series (45W), or even the 15W U-series, the 9W TDP will limit the sustained performance.

Performance

Compared to the old 7 Watt Comet Lake-Y series (like the i7-10510Y), the performance should be clearly better thanks to the 10 cores and the improved architecture of the P-cores. Compared to the 15 W U-series (like the similar specified Core i7-1265U) the sustained performance will be clearly limited by the 9 Watt TDP. As always, the performance will also greatly depend on the cooling solution, especially for fanless laptops and tablets.

Features

The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to DDR5-4800, DDR4-3200, LPDDR5-5200, and LPDDR4x-4267. The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficient cores for the best performance. For AI tasks, the CPU also integrates GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). Quick Sync in version 8 is the same as in the Rocket Lake CPUs and supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 decode, JPEG, VP8 decode, VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decode in hardware. The CPU only supports PCIe 4.0 (x8 for a GPU and two x4 for SSDs).

The integrated graphics card is based on the Xe-architecture and offers all 96 EUs (Execution Units) operating at up to 0.95 GHz.

Power consumption

This 12th gen Core i7 processor has a Base power consumption of 9 W, with 29 W being its maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption. It is built with Intel's 2nd gen 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for decent energy efficiency.