AMD Athlon 3000G review - Introduction

AMD Athlon 3000G
Athlon in da house y0!

Looking for an affordable processor that will cover all your browsing or media center needs including an integrated graphics unit? Hey, AMD might just have the perfect value proc available. The Athlon series is ongoing, and we review the 3000G. Yeah; Athlon, it brings back good memories from AMD's past, the value series that kicks in with a bit of extra value often found in overclocking (anyone remembers the old pencil trick to get things unlocked?) :)

In this day and age, things are a bit more regulated though. Today's offerings are merely a 35 Watt TDP proc with two cores (but SMT is enabled so you have four threads). It's priced just 49 bucks, purchasing a heat pipe cooler could be more expensive. Two cores, four threads, and a small integrated graphics unit; we know that recipe, it's ZEN+ and not ZEN2. Opposed to desktop Ryzen (aside from G) the Athlon has integrated graphics, it only has 3 out of 11 Vega Shader unit clusters though, so that is a rather shy 192 stream processors. Then again, fine for normal desktop and media usage really.  With increased clock speeds, the AMD Athlon 3000G continues to deliver on AMD’s promise to offer increased responsiveness, choice, and value for everyday PC users, with reliable computing for everything from every day, needs to more advanced workloads like high-definition, and even a bit of 720p gaming.

The Athlon 3000G is a dual-core part with SMT-enabled, so it has four threads active and 512 KB L2 cache per core and 4 MB shared L3 cache. The base clock is 3.50 GH, in fact it is matching the 240GE. It is fabricated on the 14m node.  Mind you, this is a dual-core (two cores) processor but has SMT (Hyper-threading) enabled, which brings four virtual processors, at a tdp of 35W.

Zen+ and not Zen2

So to reiterate, this Athlon processor is based on the Zen+ architecture. Zen+ was the 14nm refinement of AMD's original Zen architecture back in 2017. That means that IPC (instructions per clock cycle) are slightly slower than what we're getting used to with ZEN2 (Ryzen series 3000).

Vega 3

Athlon 3000G has integrated graphics, and for a 50 USD processor, quite a proper solution as well. Tagged as AMD 'Vega 3'. This once again is the same as what is harbored into the Athlon 220GE and 240GE. The clock frequency however was increased a notch. With 192 shader/stream processor you, however, should not expect gaming miracles,