Two new AMD Ryzen 'Raven Ridge' CPUs — the Athlon 200GE and Athlon Pro 200GE were spotted on Twitter and on the Asus Crosshair VII Hero motherboard's compatibility list for BIOS version 0509. This is the first time the names of these CPUs are being seen and even AMD has not mentioned about them in any of their press releases about Ryzen so far.
AMD generally reserves the Athlon moniker for its non-accelerated processing units (NPUs), which are similar to APUs but with the integrated GPU disabled. However, a Geekbench listing that has surfaced for the AMD Athlon Pro 200GE showed that these CPUs come with integrated Radeon Vega graphics. The Athlon 200GE and the Athlon Pro 200GE are virtually identical in terms of specifications save for the fact that the Pro SKU is aimed at commercial customers. Both CPUs are dual core chips with hyperthreading with a base clock of 3.2 GHz at a 35W TDP. Currently, there is some ambiguity with respect to the L3 cache size (2 MB or 4 MB) and whether onboard graphics will indeed be enabled or not. Also, information about the turbo frequency is not known at this point. It could also be that there will be no turbo boost specification altogether. Going by the Geekbench listing of a CPU+GPU combo, it can be inferred that these Athlons would be built on the 14nm process. Interestingly, neither CPU has the Ryzen branding on them.
The new Athlons could be AMD's answer to the low cost Pentium chips from Intel such as the Pentium G5400. They are essentially distilled low-cost versions of the Ryzen 3 and if the latter's multicore performance is anything to go by, we might have a great performing alternative to the Pentiums in the affordable PC segment.
Source(s)
Computerbase.de (German)