Introduction

Today, we have with us the most affordable piece of hardware that combines two big buzzwords in client computing: "Zen" and "Vega." Priced cheaper than a copy of the year's "Call of Duty," the new Athlon 200GE is targeted at entry-level desktop builds and overcomes a major product differentiation failure of its predecessors over the past couple of generations - the lack of integrated graphics.

The once-flagship Athlon brand, much like Intel Pentium, has been relegated to the entry-level segment of the market. Before "Zen" and AM4, AMD built Athlon-branded processors on its APU platforms, such as FM2+, by configuring them to be essentially A-series APUs with their integrated graphics disabled, turning them into a weird product you had to pair with discrete graphics cards. That meant you couldn't really build mom-and-pop PCs using the A-Series processors. With its Athlon "Zen" generation, AMD finally corrected this mistake.



The Athlon 200GE still very much screams "Radeon Vega" on its retail packaging, and does feature the integrated graphics processor of the "Raven Ridge" silicon, although it is heavily cut down at less than a third of the stream processors present on the silicon. Even the CPU component is halved: you only get two "Zen" CPU cores. Luckily, there's SMT, so the 2-core/4-thread configuration will play fine with some newer games that won't even start with a dual-core CPU. Interestingly, you get the full 4 MB of L3 cache physically present on the chip.

Unlike other Ryzen-based processors, the Athlon 200GE supports only memory frequencies up to 2666 MHz, even when activating AMD's equivalent of XMP profiles.

The CPU component is clocked at 3.20 GHz, with no Precision Boost. You also don't get CPU overclocking as the multiplier is locked. The integrated graphics processor, dubbed "AMD Radeon Vega 3," with the number denoting active compute units, is clocked at 1.00 GHz. This iGPU has 192 out of 704 stream processors enabled. The TDP of the chip is also lowered to 35 W, making it low-profile friendly. At $59.99, we're taking this chip to our bench with very modest expectations to see if it has more bang for your buck than Intel's latest Pentium chips.

A Closer Look

The Athlon 200GE comes in a compact white box. You can tell it's "Zen" based by looking at that orange circular brushstroke, "Athlon" written in the same font as "Ryzen," and a prominent silver band in the front face with Radeon Vega branding.


AMD is including a basic OEM cooling solution that isn't much different from the ones previous generation Athlons came with, only this one supports AM4. The cooler is essentially a hunk of aluminium ventilated by a 60 mm PWM fan, and looks sufficient to cool a processor with just 35 W TDP.


The Athlon 200GE package looks just like any other Ryzen socket AM4 processor, with a metal integrated heat-spreader up front and a 1,331-pin PGA at the back.


AMD continues to use the AM4 socket, which means all existing Ryzen motherboards will be compatible with the Athlon 200GE. The company also plans to stick to AM4 for the rest of this decade, so there's a pretty long upgrade path ahead for this platform.

Architecture

The Athlon 200GE is built on the same 14 nm "Raven Ridge" silicon as the much pricier Ryzen 2000G APUs. This chip is a full-fledged SoC which combines a CPU, an integrated GPU (iGPU), a dual-channel DDR4 memory controller, platform I/O, and integrated southbridge. Unlike the 8-core "Pinnacle Ridge" silicon, "Raven Ridge" has just four "Zen" CPU cores, of which two are disabled in this chip, and a rather large iGPU based on the "Vega" graphics architecture, of which only 3 out of 11 Vega next-gen compute units (NGCUs) are enabled.

Unlike the Ryzen 3 2200G, the Athlon 200GE features SMT, making its CPU component 2-core/4-thread. SMT is necessitated by an increasing number of games refusing to work with less than four logical processors. This is also why Intel added HyperThreading to even its Pentium parts. The addition of SMT also allows AMD to improve the CPU's competitiveness to the Celeron G4900 series processors based on the "Coffee Lake" silicon, which lack HTT. The CPU is clocked at 3.20 GHz and lacks some of the AMD SmartMI features its Ryzen-branded siblings have, such as Precision Boost.



The "Raven Ridge" silicon combines one quad-core "Zen" compute complex (CCX) and a large iGPU with up to 11 NGCUs. It's important to note that the CCX of "Raven Ridge" is slightly different from the one found on "Summit Ridge" because its shared L3 cache is halved to just 4 MB. Interestingly, AMD decided to give the Athlon 200GE the full amount of L3 cache present on this chip. Each of the two cores has 512 KB of dedicated L2 cache.

Another major difference between "Pinnacle Ridge" and "Raven Ridge" is the latter's smaller PCI-Express (PCIe) root complex. While "Summit Ridge" features 16 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes toward PEG (PCI-Express Graphics) in addition to 4 lanes allocated to the chipset-bus and another 4 lanes driving an M.2 NVMe slot, "Raven Ridge" puts out just 8 lanes toward PEG, besides 4 lanes as chipset-bus and 4 lanes for the M.2 NVMe slot. What this means is that the second PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot on X370 and X470 chipset motherboards won't work, and whatever graphics card you install in the first slot will run at PCI-Express 3.0 x8 (half bandwidth). This design choice is bewildering due to the potential perception drama. The actual performance lost from PCIe x8 3.0 vs. PCIe x16 3.0 is minimal unless you're using some of the newer NVIDIA Turing GPUs, which makes no sense given the low price point of the Athlon 200GE. The Vega integrated graphics is connected to the CPU using Infinity Fabric.

The iGPU implements AMD's latest "Vega" architecture with separate regions on the "Raven Ridge" silicon for the iGPU's key components and the display controllers with multimedia processing. It is endowed with 192 stream processors spread across 3 compute units, 12 TMUs, and 4 ROPs. It features DirectX 12 and Vulkan support and can conduct hardware-accelerated decoding of HEVC/H.265/VP10. It has the necessary DRM features to enable playback of Netflix 4K-HDR and other emerging high-resolution content services. Its display controllers support 4K Ultra HD and 5K displays through DisplayPort 1.4. The iGPU is hence branded "Radeon Vega 3."

The Zen Architecture

The oldest reports about AMD working on the "Zen" architecture date back to 2012, when AMD re-hired CPU core designer Jim Keller credited with the original winning K8 and K9 architecture designs to work on a new core architecture to succeed "Bulldozer." AMD continued to invest in the "Bulldozer" IP in the form of incremental core updates, hoping that trends in the software industry towards parallelization would improve, giving it a big break in price/performance. Those trends, in the form of DirectX 12 and Vulkan 3D APIs being multi-core friendly, came in a tad late (towards late 2016). Four years of work by a team dedicated to its development, led by Jim Keller, resulted in the "Zen" core.



At the heart of the "Zen" core are two very important innovations - a very "intelligent" branch-prediction system that uses neural nets (yes, of the same kind as power deep-learning machinery) to predict branches in code and load the most appropriate instructions and allocation of core resources and a 1.5X increase in issue width and execution resources, besides a 1.75X increase in the instruction scheduler window. Intel had been beating AMD in core performance and efficiency in exactly these two areas, and AMD finally addressed it instead of throwing in many more hardware resources without addressing the branch-prediction issues. "Zen" also features an up-to-date ISA instruction set including AVX2, FMA3, and SHA.



Interestingly, AMD talks about refinements to the micro-architecture itself in its Ryzen 2000G press deck for these processors, which speak of improvements to the various SenseMI components.