AMD revived its Athlon brand in September when it launched the "reimagined" Athlone 200GE, basically a low-end APU (accelerated processing) unit combining x86 Zen CPU cores with Radeon Vega 3 graphics. Now three months later, it's launching two more models.
The new Athlon 220GE and Athlon 240GE are both 2-core/4-thread CPUs, just like the Athlon 200GE. And like the Athlon 200GE, the two new SKUs feature three Radeon compute units based on the company's Vega architecture for graphics.
Here's a breakdown of the specs:
- Athlon 240GE: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.5GHz, 3 compute units, 35W TDP, $75
- Athlon 220GE: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.4GHz, 3 compute units, 35W TDP, $65
- Athlon 200GE: 2 cores / 4 threads, 3.2GHz, 3 compute units, 35W TDP, $55
"The AMD Athlon family of processors provides consumers with significantly better value and availability than the competition. Athlon 200GE processors offer up to 67 percent more graphics performance and up to two times greater power efficiency, delivering up to 84 percent faster high-definition PC gaming than the competition," AMD said.
AMD claims the increased clockspeeds of the Athlon 220GE and 240GE further deliver on its promise of providing "reliable computing for everything from everyday needs to more advanced workloads like high-definition, out-of-the-box 720p gaming."
As we mentioned before, they won't compete with the best CPUs for gaming, and gaming at large is probably a stretch. The specs imply 192 streaming cores. By our estimation, performance should be roughly equivalent to a Radeon HD 4890. That said, AMD previously provided some of its own benchmark figures at 720P:
- DOTA 2 @ 720p (low): 65 fps
- CS:Go @ 720p (ultra): 71 fps
- Fortnite @ 720p (low): 49 fps
- League of Legends @ 720p (ultra): 111 fps
- Rocket League @ 720p (medium): 67 fps
- Overwatch @ 720p (low): 59 fps
Those apply to the Athlon 200GE. The faster clockspeeds of the Athlon 220GE and 240GE will likely raise performance to a small degree, but probably not to the point where they could handle demanding games without a discrete GPU.
AMD says the new chips are available now. They weren't showing up on Amazon or Newegg at the time of this writing, but that is likely to change by the end of the day.
