What is AMD Equivalent to Celeron?

Most of us are familiar with the Intel CPU lineup, however, with the growing popularity of its competitor, many are turning towards the team red (AMD).

Intel Celeron, however, holds a very unique place. It does not have a direct competitor in AMD. Intel Celeron CPUs represent the bottom most rung of the PC CPU market in terms of performance.

At an average, in any given generation, Celeron CPUs are almost half as powerful as their Intel Pentium counterparts – the next in the rung of performance hierarchy. 

Now the least powerful lineup of CPUs by AMD is the Athlon series and this series competes with Intel Pentium NOT with the weaker Intel Celeron series.

When it comes to the overall performance of the CPU, it is often a cat and a mouse chase between Intel and AMD. Sometimes Intel can exceed its competitor in performance only to be drastically beaten by AMD in the next generation. 

In the following text, I will talk about the CPU lineup by both brands in general and specifically talk about how Intel Celeron compares with the AMD CPUs.

CPU Series Hierarchy from Intel and AMD

Both Intel and AMD have different series of CPUs that cater to a specific price segment of the market. 

The following list gives a brief glimpse of the different CPU lineups and where they stand in the performance hierarchy

• Intel Core i9 = AMD Ryzen 9 – Most Powerful Commercial Lineup
• Intel Core i7 = AMD Ryzen 7
• Intel Core i5 = AMD Ryzen 5
• Intel Core i3 = AMD Ryzen 3
• Intel Pentium = AMD Athlon – Budget Segment
• Intel Celeron = No direct AMD competitor – Entry Level Segment

A Note on CPU Generations

It should be noted that each of the series above is subdivided into different generations. AMD and Intel both release new generations of CPUs almost every year or so.

As such, when comparing two CPUs, particularly between Intel and AMD, you have to make sure that you are comparing CPUs that belong to a relatively similar generation.

For instance, it would be unwise to compare an Intel 13th Gen Core i7 CPU released in 2022 with an AMD Ryzen 7 1000 series CPU released all the way back in 2017. The results would obviously be skewed in favor of the Intel CPU.

You would naturally compare 13th Gen Intel CPUs with the latest Ryzen 7000 series CPUs because there is parity in generation.

The same should apply when comparing the Intel Celeron with any of the AMD CPUs in the market. Although since there is no direct competitor to Celeron in AMD, you could go back a generation or two to find the right competitor in the Athlon lineup.

Comparing the Weakest Intel Lineup (Celeron) With Weakest AMD Lineup (Athlon)

Let us compare how the Intel Celeron compares with AMD Athlon – both are the weakest series from the respective brands.

In order to compare, I will use the popular benchmark scores for the latest AMD Athlon as well as the latest Intel Celeron CPUs in the market. I will use the scores from Passmark benchmark for the purpose of comparison here.

While benchmarks aren’t 100% reliable, they are an excellent way to gauge and compare performances of CPUs particularly since the core count and CPU speed is not a reliable method of comparison.

There are some very interesting conclusions we can draw from the table above. Note that while there are many Athlon and Celeron CPUs out there, I have only taken the popular flagship CPUs for desktop and laptop from each series. 

For starters, it is important to point out that the most recent generation of Athlon CPUs was released all the way back in 2020. There hasn’t been an update of this series yet.

Intel Celeron CPUs, on the other hand, have seen new iterations almost every year. The most current CPU, Intel Celeron G6900 for desktops, was released in 2022.

Athlon Series is Diverse

You will note that AMD has two different types of CPUs for desktops: one is a quad core CPU (Athlon 3150G) and the other is a dual core CPU (Athlon 3000G).

They both are drastically different in terms of performance. So much so that AMD Athlon 3150G competes more with the more powerful Intel Pentium CPUs, whereas the Athlon 3000G is more comparable to the Celeron CPUs.

In other words, while Athlon series aims to compete with Pentium series, it does have weaker CPUs as well in its lineup. So while Intel has the weak and weakest CPUs sub-divided into two separate series i.e Pentium and Celeron respectively, AMD does not draw separate lines for the two categories.

AMD Athlon Still Wins against Celeron Despite Being Old

The newest Intel Celeron CPUs for both laptop and desktop verticals have come quite close to the performance of AMD CPUs, however, there is still ground to be covered.

The desktop grade Intel Celeron G6900 is more or less similar in performance to the AMD Athlon 3000G.

The laptop-grade Intel Celeron N5100 is a bit weaker compared to the Athlon 3150U (3352 vs 4011 score) but we can expect that ground to be covered in the next generation of Celeron CPUs.

Comparing Older Generation of Celeron with Athlon Will be Disappointing 

While the latest Celeron CPUs can stack up against some of the Athlon 3000 series CPUs, if you compare older Celeron CPUs, you will be thoroughly disappointed. 

Take the following older CPUs for instance:

You can see that the older Celeron CPUs come nowhere near any of the Athlon 3000 series CPUs.

For older Celeron CPUs, the AMD equivalent would be from the now obsolete A10 series for desktops and A8 / A6 series for Laptops.

So What is AMD Equivalent to Celeron?

Given the current series, there isn’t a direct AMD equivalent to the Intel Celeron series. There are a few select CPUs from AMD that can compare with some of the newer Celeron processors in terms of performance.

However, for a majority of the Celeron CPUs, a direct comparison can only be made with the obsolete A10, A8, or A6 series of AMD CPUs.