Back in the mists of time (or the early 2000's as they were more widely known) AMD's Athlon branding used to be a mainstay of their CPU lineup. In later years it was delegated to a secondary role through entry-level and low power components, rather than the flagships position it once occupied. Most recently Athlon popped up as branding for CPUs derived from APU designs but with the GPU component fused off, and appeared to have been largely phased out with the introduction of Ryzen. Now it appears Athlon is back as two new models have been uncovered, both based on the Raven Ridge architecture released earlier this year.

Late last week Anandtech received a tip that two new entries had popped up in the processor compatibility list for the ASUS Crosshair VII Hero, validated on BIOS revision 0509.



The first is the Athlon 200GE, a dual-core processor clocked at 3.2GHz with 4MB L3 Cache. The second is for its Pro series equivalent, featuring the same specs. but eligible for the higher tier of support offered to Pro series components.

As it turns out, Geekbench also features a listing for the AMD Athlon Pro 200 GE. The numbers aren't particularly important - results so far ahead of release aren't necessarily indicative of performance at release - but what is interesting is that the processor is listed as incorporating Radeon Vega Graphics. This would make it the first desktop Athlon to include integrated graphics, and not require a discrete graphics solution alongside it.

Subsequent to this, Computerbase.de reported that these Athlon APUs would feature Vega 3 graphics, broadly matching the spec of the mobile Ryzen 3 2200U (albeit with a far less stringent TDP envelope). If correct it would mean that the processor's GPU is equipped with three Compute Units of 64 shaders for 192 shaders total. For comparison, desktop Ryzen Raven Ridge APUs released thus far have RX Vega 8 and 11 graphics (8 and 11 CU's respectively).

The capabilities of these APUs indicate a design intended to be exceptionally affordable, even more so than the Ryzen APUs released thus far. Complete with a dual-core/4-thread design, they look set to tangle with Intel's Pentium Gold lineup.

The APUs are expected to be formally unveiled at Computex 2018 alongside new 400-series motherboard chipsets.

SOURCES: Anandtech, Computerbase.de