AMD’s latest APUs will be launching in the middle of February 2018, and consumers are very eager to get their hands on these chips for extra-budget builds. Heck, I’m even excited for the prospect of more powerful integrated graphics. With just a few weeks to go, official specifications for the Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G have been leaked, and it’s looking quite positive.
According to TechpowerUp, AMD’s Ryzen 3 2200G will go on sale for $100, challenging competitors from Intel like the Pentium G4620, offering two extra physical cores and a much improved graphics core. The Ryzen 5 2400G, which will retail for $170, will take on Intel’s Core i3-7100 and Core i3-7350K, offering four cores and four threads, an unlocked multiplier, and the largest number of shader units AMD has put on a socketed consumer-bound processor to date.
| Ryzen 3 2200G | Ryzen 5 2400G | |
| Cores/Threads | 4/4 | 4/8 |
| CPU clock speed | 3.5-3.7GHz | 3.6-3.9GHz |
| Caches | 2MB L2 + 4MB L3 | 2MB L2 + 4MB L3 |
| Graphics | Radeon Vega 8 | Radeon Vega 11 |
| Shader units | 512 | 704 |
| GPU clock speed | 1100MHz | 1250MHz |
| Memory support | Dual-channel DDR4-2933 | Dual-channel DDR4-2933 |
| Max RAM support | 64GB | 64GB |
| TDP limit | 65W | 65W |
| Launch price (USD) | $99.99 | $169.99 |
Looking at the specs sheet and then going over the one for the Xbox One S, we can see that the Ryzen 5 2400G is pretty close to Microsoft’s console on paper. It only lacks 64 shader units, or two GCN cores, and has a clock speed advantage. AMD’s performance on dual-channel DDR4 setups also puts memory bandwidth limits at around 35GB/s using DDR4-2933 memory modules, while the One S has 68.2GB/s of memory bandwidth on tap, taking the eSRAM boost out of the equation. This could be an extremely close matchup, although the One S will always win the value comparison purely based on price – it’s impossible to build a system with a Ryzen 5 2400G that comes with 8GB of RAM, a motherboard, case, power supply, and storage space for less than an Xbox One S (currently at R5,000).
For $100 (around R1,200), the Ryzen 3 2200G could replace the AMD A10-9700 APU in my most recent R5,000 build in my System Builders Guide, and it would probably offer much better performance for the same cost. With an estimated 30-40% increase in GPU performance, not to mention a raw 70% jump in single-thread CPU performance, that would be the biggest boost to budget gamers in over a decade. It’ll be overclockable too, likely erasing any advantages Intel’s Pentium processors might have had in that area.
Three weeks, everyone. Just three weeks to wait.
Source: TechpowerUp