AMD Athlon 300U vs AMD Ryzen 7 2700 vs AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

AMD Athlon 300U

The AMD Athlon 300U is a mobile entry level dual core SoC that was announced in January 2019. It combines two Zen cores (with SMT / Hyperthreading so running 4 threads) clocked at 2.4 - 3.3 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 3 graphics card with 3 CUs (192 Shaders) clocked at up to 1000 MHz. Specified at 15 Watt TDP, the SoC is intended for thin mid-range laptops. It is quite similar to the AMD Ryzen 3 3200U (2.6 - 3.5 GHz).

Compared to the Picasso APUs of the Ryzen 3000 series, the Athlon 300U is still based on the first generation of the 2000 series. Only the PRO variant is based on the new Zen+ microarchitecture that should lead to a 3% IPS (performance per clock) improvement.

The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR4-2400 memory. As the features of the Picasso APUs are the same compared to the Raven Ridge predecessors, we point to our Raven Ridge launch article.

In contrast to the faster quad-core Picasso APUs, the Athlon 300U only supports 3 instead of 4 displays in total.

Performance wise, the Athlon 300 should be slightly slower than the Ryzen 3 2200U (2.5 - 3.4 GHz Dual Core with SMT).

AMD Ryzen 7 2700

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700 is an eight-core desktop processor that can handle sixteen threads simultaneously thanks to Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT). This technology is equivalent to Intel's Hyper-Threading. Launched in April 2018, the Ryzen 7 2700 is the second fastest Ryzen 7 processor and is much more economical than its flagship sibling. The Ryzen 7 2700 has a 65 W TDP, which is nearly 50% more efficient than the 105 W TDP Ryzen 7 2700 X. This energy efficiency comes at a cost to performance though.

The Ryzen 7 2700 has a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz, which can be boosted by Extended Frequency Range (XFR) up to 4.1 GHz. The power gain is still high in multi-threaded applications, although this is some way off the Ryzen 7 2700X. The Ryzen 7 2700 benefits from AMD's new Zen+ architecture, with a greater number of instructions per cycle (IPC) and higher clock speeds than last year's Zen chips. The Ryzen 7 2700's eight cores are divided into two clusters that are connected by Infinity Fabric, a subset of HyperTransport. Each cluster has its own L3 cache.

The Ryzen 7 2700 has good performance in games. However, if it is operating at a lower base clock because of low TDP, then the Ryzen 7 2700 falls behind the Ryzen 5 2600 in gaming benchmarks. This behaviour could be because many games currently lack multi-core support. Hence, games rely more on clock speed more than core count.

Detailed information, benchmarks and values can be found in our review of the Ryzen 7 2700.

AMD Ryzen 3 2200G

The AMD Ryzen 3 2200G is a desktop APU that was announced in early 2018. It combines four Zen cores (4 threads as no SMT/HyperThreading support) clocked at 3.5 - 3.7 GHz with a Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics card with 8 CUs (512 of the 704 Shaders on the chip) clocked at up to 1100 MHz. The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR-2933. The TDP is specified at 65 Watt and the CPU, GPU and memory are unlocked for overclocking. More information on Raven Ridge can be found in our launch article.