News AMD brings back Athlon in Zen-based form

Locked cpu

 

Shoulda resurrected the Duron brand for this.

 

So they've gone from being APUs sans the GPU to just hobbled APUs.

Also if the bottom of the range 200GE is £43, that means the high up models are likely going to be within sniffing distance of the rull-on Ryzen 2200G at £89 [iirc].

 

Literally got half way through bringing this exact point up before having to do some actual work! It seems like AMD priced themselves into a bit of a corner. Makes me wonder if they are happy to make a loss on the very low end to grab a bit of market share further up?

 

I'm sure that they aren't taking a loss on the chips. They already have, let's say, 90% of the R&D done as they all use the same cores. In fact, as they are only dual cores, they're more than likely just damaged chips like in the olden days whereby you could chance it and try to unlock more. I doubt they'll let you do that now, but that's my feeling on it.

 

I agree - these are probably the chips that, for whatever reason (instability at necessary clocks, outright duff core, seriously weak IMC, whatever) didn't make the cut at any of the higher bins and as such were likely destined for the great silicon recycling bin.

Intel has always played this game too - cutting cache or whatever down as necessary and repurposing at the lower end. It has played well at times; I remember having great fun clocking the hell out of an E5200 (at least, I think it was an E5200, it's been a long long time...) which I was under the impression was a cache-cut E6000 part. I might be wrong in that, though; too long ago. I managed a 100% overclock on it (the only time I've bothered pushing something that hard) but ended up giving it to a friend. Replaced it with an E5400, which despite a higher multiplier, never clocked as well. Ah well, such is life.

Wow, sorry, didn't mean to go down memory lane...

 

As MDD said, it's likely these are chips that have defective cores or CU's, and would probably have no other use - if that's true then it's not loss making, it's just good business sense.
These would probably be great for office desktops if one of the big players decided to integrate them. For us, they'd probably be ideal for an HTPC or streaming box with a bit of extra oomph for other things.

 

That’s just it. They can recycle them and lose the core entirely, having to produce another, or they can sell it for a few bucks. It just makes huge financial sense.

On the topic of memory lane, I too have fond memories of those chips. The E2140 that I had was spectacular. It maxed out on FSB and achieved a 118% overclock on air, which was used as a daily clock. I then got another on eBay that was doing the rounds in the UK OC scene at the time, which could handle a near 160% overclock on single stage cooling. They were so much fun.

 

Absolutely. To all of it.

AMD have an even more interesting history of cutting off bad sections and using that Intel in that respect... triple core CPUS! I couldn't decide whether that was genius or insanity at the time...

 

This would be the perfect low end APU for the kind of office PC I build for family members. For what they do they just don't need lots of cores, but it has a couple of good cores and the GPU.