An extensive review has appeared online claiming to share benchmarks and other technical details of an unannounced AMD Renoir APU. The subject of the review, published on Yandex Zen, is the AMD Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE, which we reported on ten days ago when a leaked benchmark result surfaced on CPU-Z.
Now we have many more tests and comparisons to chew over, assuming the review from author 'Another Crimea' is genuine, and a conclusion that the new Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE could be a "budget hit," as long as folk can find one, and gets widespread official distribution at a more agreeable price.
To establish a foundation of key tech specs before we go on, the 4150GE features a 4C/4T CPU with base/boost clock speeds of 3.3/3.8 GHz, 4MB L3 cache, and it mixes these with a Radeon Vega GPU with five GPU cores for 320 stream processors running at 1.5 GHz. The 7nm package has a modest 35W TDP, according to the source.
To test the unannounced AMD Renoir APU, the reviewer tested it with appropriately priced components like a budget Gigabyte B450 motherboard, the AMD Wraith Stealth cooler, dual channel DDR4-3000 RAM, and a PCIe Gen 3 SSD boot drive with Windows 10 installed. The author ran the unannounced Athlon against the publicly known quantity that is the Ryzen 3 1300X. They said they thought this was an interesting direct comparison to make as it was supported by the same platform and the 1300X was "the fastest quad-core of the Zen generation." Of course, take all the results with a grain of salt.
The first test runs were done in CPU-Z, so we have a comparison to the leaks 10 days ago. Today's review subject did a little better than the one documented last week scoring 463.8 and 1,846.5 in 1T and nT tests, respectively. The previously unearthed results were 460 and 1785 in 1T and nT tests, respectively – better but not too different, considering all the other variables at play.
Moving along, the reviewer worked their way through the likes of AIDA 64, Fritz Chess, NovaBench, Geekbench 5, Passmark CPU Mark, Blender, various 3DMark components, various Cinebench releases and more. The author was specific about cooling, stating that the 'stock' cooler performed ably with this 35W APU, and in a 26 degrees Celsius room, the CPU never exceeded 53 degrees Celsius. Some extra tests were done with a modest overclock of the CPU cores, to 4.1GHz.
The all-important conclusion of the review, after picking through all the test scores and comparisons, was that this quad-core is a winner if you want to upgrade an older AM4 platform. The AMD Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE left behind the likes of the Intel Core i3-9100 (4C/4T), but newer Intel chips will be better in both 1T and nT workloads. However, the 4150GE with its built-in Radeon graphics could be a better choice with its CPU/GPU performance balance, for some home/office users.
Hopefully, this new Athlon APU signals AMD putting some more efforts into the low-to-mid end of the market. The appearance of this new Athlon might add a spring to the step of an AMD motherboard owner looking for a budget segment modern upgrade. Intel's CES 2022 ADL-S launches certainly don't shy away from mass market pricing, so this can make AMD's offerings more competitive on the cheap.
The Athlon APU reviewed cost the equivalent of $144 via China's Alibaba but it is noted the sole seller has upped the sell offer to about $175. These prices might be OK to an interested enthusiast, but would not likely appeal to a lot of upgraders looking sideways at the likes of the perky Core i3-12100 with 4C/8T and a suggested retail price of $125 (though it would require a new motherboard for AM4 stalwarts).
