Wednesday, September 5th 2018
AMD Athlon Pro 200GE Detailed: An Extremely Cut-down "Raven Ridge" at $55
AMD is giving finishing touches to its Athlon Pro 200GE socket AM4 SoC, which it could position against Intel's $50-ish Celeron LGA1151 SKUs. Leaked slides by PCEva reveals that it's a heavily cut-down 14 nm "Raven Ridge" die. For starters, unlike previous-generation Athlon-branded products on platforms such as FM2, the Athlon 200GE won't lack integrated graphics. Only 3 out of 11 Vega NGCUs will be enabled, translating to 192 stream processors, which should be enough for desktop, 2D, and video acceleration, but not serious gaming, even at low resolutions.
The CPU config is 2-core/4-thread, with 512 KB L2 cache per core, and 4 MB shared L3 cache. The CPU is clocked at 3.20 GHz, with no Precision Boost features. You still get GuardMI commercial-grade hardware security features. There is a big catch with one of its uncore components. The PCIe root-complex only supports PCI-Express 3.0 x4 out of your motherboard's topmost x16 slot, not even x8. Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APUs already offer a crippled x8 connectivity through this slot. AMD claims that the Athlon 200GE will be "up to 19 percent faster" than Intel Pentium G4560 at productivity work. When it launches on 6th September with market availability from 18th September, the Athlon Pro 200GE will be priced at USD $55.
Sources:
PCEva, HD-Technologica, VideoCardz
The CPU config is 2-core/4-thread, with 512 KB L2 cache per core, and 4 MB shared L3 cache. The CPU is clocked at 3.20 GHz, with no Precision Boost features. You still get GuardMI commercial-grade hardware security features. There is a big catch with one of its uncore components. The PCIe root-complex only supports PCI-Express 3.0 x4 out of your motherboard's topmost x16 slot, not even x8. Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APUs already offer a crippled x8 connectivity through this slot. AMD claims that the Athlon 200GE will be "up to 19 percent faster" than Intel Pentium G4560 at productivity work. When it launches on 6th September with market availability from 18th September, the Athlon Pro 200GE will be priced at USD $55.
56 Comments on AMD Athlon Pro 200GE Detailed: An Extremely Cut-down "Raven Ridge" at $55
PCIe 4x is fine as long as you don't run anything faster than a GTX1080, which would be silly anyway (unless doing GPU heavy work of course).
Graphics performance difference is not surprising, 192sp vs 96sp. I am really-really curious though how it compares to 192sp UHD630.
The yields must be pretty good if they only now have 200k chips that have to be cut down this far. 20k/month is probably a good variable to indicate yield :)
Otherwise it's not much faster than current Bristol ridge offerings and even has a weaker iGPU than its predecessors (old R7 graphics is about 40-50% slower than Vega8, but in theory faster than this Vega3). A8-9600 is probably the best competitor out of three, 'cause it's a quad-core(dual-module) CPU with a much faster iGP and comparable price tag.
BTW, it's the first time I see my retail price lower than the US. It retails at $60-65 in states, and I can get one right now for $53, and it's not even on sale....
P.S. They should've named it Sempron 200LE, cause you can't go any lower....
... for no other reason, then FCUK YOU, customers.
my router is a bit busy but I had planned an intel cause in that scenario they are superior but I do happen to have a spare am4 motherboard so I guess I'll go for athlon then.
22FDX ~20% lower cost than 14LPP/12LP.
12FDX over 30% lower cost than 14LPP/12LP.
Where is our ultra-cheap alternatives and successor to AM1 AMD?!
:shadedshu:
22FDX =
- DDR4 up to 3600 in a single channel and 64-bit LPDDR4(X) up to 4266. // Foundation IP.
- PCIe 4.0 // Foundation IP.
etc. Couple that with the small dies of Bobcat(90 mm squared) to Stoney Ridge(125 mm squared). It would have been better than this false Raven2 rip-off.
Now for someone to launch an AM4 ITX board with 6 SATA ports, or at least DTX (or "mATX" which they seem to call anything slightly larger than ITX these days, regardless if it's smaller than actual mATX) board with two PCIe expansion slots and a low price.
I have a cheap-ass AsRock J3455B-ITX running gateway/firewall/VPN for a small organization with around 20 connected devices and it works flawlessly. Another one of those does some basic tunneling to several of our servers in remote data centers, runs private mail server, FTP, SMB, collects backups from local PCs and large data backups from 2 remote servers.
Just regular consumer boards, which cost about the same as that new Athlon.
What's cool, is that you can get a regular J3455-ITX board (no COM/LPT as on B-version, but it does have a mini-PCIe slot), and install one of those chinese miniPCIe to dual-LAN extension cards(realtek-based), and use the remaining PCIe x1 for an additional SATA controller, if you want more storage options. Not even there... AMD is really bad at that. 2 years ago they even said that "AMD has no plans to get involved in Embedded and Mobile segment", and hasn't released any sub 10W parts in consumer segment since Carrizo-L, and even then they were simply rehashing the same old Bobcat/Jaguar-based crap, they've been playing with since 2011. They've supposedly released some low-power embedded SoCs for enterprise and industrial applications, but I've never-ever seen those in the wild.
The only reason it did not replace my old Zotac with A88X mobo, is because of active cooling. Old board has an enormous, even for 15-25W SoC, heatsink. I mean, the whole board is covered with aluminium fins and weighs almost a kilo. All it needs is the cheapest 60W PicoPSU and some vents on the side panel of my ITX box, so the hot air can escape on its own.
And the only reason I did not replace it with a faster 6W Intel SoC, is because those lack the I/O, which is very-very sad....
Maybe some time in the future I'm gonna hunt-down a used Xeon-D Supermicro board (really want an octa-core, so I can run a few VMs) and replace all of my toys with one mini-server...