AMD's Athlon CPUs Finally Get Some Zen 2 Love

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This chip could be a possible reboot of the Athlon 3000 series with the Zen 2 architecture.

Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE
(Image credit: AliExpress)

One of AMD's yet unreleased Athlon Gold 4000G series (Renoir) APUs, the Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE, has appeared at online retailer AliExpress. As Komachi_Ensaka tweeted, the new chip is available for $118.29 -- discounted from $168.99. Unfortunately, the listing shows only one CPU remains in stock, so it wouldn't be surprising to see this listing disappear once someone picks it up.

The seller notes that the CPUs are used and not brand new products. The chips also come from various locations, including China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, and more. If we had to guess from this information, the seller has probably acquired engineering samples of the product.

The seller also released a CPU-Z snapshot, showcasing critical specifications of the CPU. The CPU appears to have a base clock of 3.3 GHz and 4MB of L3 cache, along with four cores and four threads.

This listing is super interesting because AMD has not officially launched any new Athlon Gold CPUs with the 4000G series branding just yet. There have also been no rumors about a new Athlon refresh from AMD, making this new listing very intriguing to see.

The Athlon Gold 3000G lineup currently consists of the quad-core (4 threaded) Athlon Gold 3150 GE, 3150G, and dual-core 3050 GE. In addition, Pro equivalents, such as the Athlon Gold Pro 3150G, Pro 3150GE, and Pro 3125GE, are also available. However, these parts are outdated as they utilize Zen+ cores and launched over a year ago. So it makes sense that AMD would be refreshing the Athlon series under the 4000G series branding to remain competitive in the entry-level segment. In addition, Intel has prepared new Alder Lake-based Pentiums and Celerons that may launch relatively soon.

Since this new Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE uses the 4000G series branding, we suspect that this chip features AMD's more contemporary and much faster Zen 2 cores. Unfortunately, we have no idea or hints of when AMD will announce the Athlon Gold 4000G chips. The only other indication of AMD re-using its 4000G series branding in new CPUs is the rumors revolving around Renior-X, including refreshed versions of the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X under the 4000G series lineup to fend off the forthcoming Alder Lake's Core i3 SKUs. These new Athlon chips could be under that Renoir-X umbrella as well, but it's only a wild guess at this point.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • NightHawkRMX
    Good to see dual cores being less and less prevalent.

    A 4c4t Zen 2 CPU would probably be pretty decent performance... hmm
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    So it's a rebranded 3100 with a GPU, but what about the GPU component? At that price level it's going to have to be so anemic it will likely have issues with most any game, even casual games, so it's going to be targeted at office use, but at that price point how would it stack up against an Adder Lake competitor?
    Reply
  • NightHawkRMX
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    So it's a rebranded 3100 with a GPU, but what about the GPU component? At that price level it's going to have to be so anemic it will likely have issues with most any game, even casual games, so it's going to be targeted at office use, but at that price point how would it stack up against an Adder Lake competitor?
    No hyperthreading, so not a 3100. The GPU would also take away some cache.

    That price is probably not what this CPU would ever MSRP for if AMD were to sell it retail.

    The 5600g and 5700g before their retail release could also be found on sites like AliExpress but sold for FAR more than the prices they launched at when they were sold for retail.

    So it is safe to assume the list price for this CPU is higher than what you would expect to pay if this or something similar were to become a retail product.
    Reply
  • PiranhaTech
    I wonder what process node they'd be manufactured under. It would be clever if they used an older node (or the current one, which will be phased out eventually)
    Reply