AMD could be planning a return to the lower end of the workstation market, reports have claimed.
Tom’s Hardware has reported that a Twitter account, allegedly from Bangkok, published a CPU-Z benchmark for an upcoming AMD Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) called Athlon Gold Pro 4150GE ‘Renoir’.
The Pro lineup is usually reserved for business PCs and laptops, but the company announced a new range of AMD Athlon II processors only a few months ago, dropping power consumption for its more affordable range, without cutting down on performance.
AMD Athlon Pro returns?
According to the leaker, who appears to be legitimate, the APU will run four cores, each at 3800 MHz, and will sport a 4MB L3 cache. It will have a built-in Radeon Vega GPU, handling 320 stream processors. The CPU-Z benchmark results show a 460 single-thread points score, as well as 1785 multi-thread points. That puts it in the range of Intel Core i3-10100F and the Intel Core i3-9100F.
The report further explains how the APU should be compatible with AM4 motherboards (if it gets the proper BIOS) and should support all of AMD’s enterprise-level security features. That should, the publication assumes, put its price tag a bit above the competition.
The price of the chip is yet unknown, and could be relatively hard to pinpoint, as some experts are speculating it could be below the $200 mark, possibly even as low as $120.
This is not the first time AMD’s been leaking information regarding its upcoming low-range processor, with another Twitter account claiming to show an image of the processor just a few weeks ago.
For the past two years, AMD has focused almost exclusively on the high-end part of the market, with its Zen 2 and Zen 3 microarchitectures. However, the hardware market is not the same as it was two years ago, and AMD is now looking back at re-entering the fray to ensure its continued success.
TechRadar Pro has contacted AMD for further information or comment.
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Via: Tom’s Hardware
