Athlon 200GE - the ultimate great place-holder CPU?

[whm1974]

Well 2C/4T is not that bad really, AMD could have made a 2c/4t Athlon with Vega 11 and the bottleneck would still be the DDR4. Im not sure what AMD will do 2C and 3CU on 7nm sounds like insanely small and cheap to the point someone could made a RPI-like board for less than $100 with it. but i just cant ignore the fact that next gen Atoms are going to have more IGP power than current Intel desktop CPUs, AMD should not understimate that if they wish to compete on Chromebooks and cheap Notebooks that are currently dominated by Atoms.

The same applies to future Sunny Cove Celerons on PCs. 3CU whiles its cheap, sounds like a huge mistake to me, to me it needs to be 6CU minimum.

With 7nm, and the R1000(?) cores AMD working on, maybe they might go with Big.Little cores like ARM SOCs. I'm thinking 2c/4t dual Big cores w/ quad Little cores and has a 6CU iGPU.
This could be suitable for both Single Board Computers, and lower cost notebooks.

 

[amd6502]

Well no doubt they would use 14nm or 12nm for a native dual core. (7nm would be about the greatest mismatch of a node to a product as one cound get) And yes I agree 3CU would be a mistake. Either 4CU or 5CU would add negligible area and really boost performance for dual channel setups (33% and 67% respectively). As far as CPU power it's plenty; I'd be more than happy with it as it looks like would outperforms my 9720p while getting better battery life.

If it has all the efficiency improvements that we expect in Pinnacles it should really be the sweet spot product for notebooks. You could even have entry gaming capable notebooks when combined with a dGPU that is used when plugged in and gaming.

 

[Abwx]

Ah great, there we finally have a dedicated 2c4t die in Banded Kestrel (dubbed Ryzen R1000 for embedded). https://www.computerbase.de/2019-04/amd-ryzen-r1000-zen-dual-core-vega3-atari-vcs/

Something like 65-70% area of RR but with better yields, cost should be 40% lower, it should be a vey good chip perf/watt wise, noticeably better than a 2C/4T harvested out of their 4C APU.

 

[burninatortech4]

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A320TM-ITX/index.asp - 19V power brick power capability

and a 200ge - do we finally have an 'AM1 like' replacement?

No price listed yet but its close relative the A320M-ITX is still in the 85-95$ range. Too expensive for the kinds of projects I'd use an AM1 build for in the past.

I hope they price is closer to $60 but that may be optimistic.

 

[Shivansps]

Im hoping to see ITX boards with unsold Ryzen mobile APUs sometime in the future.

 

[NostaSeronx]

Something like 65-70% area of RR but with better yields, cost should be 40% lower, it should be a vey good chip perf/watt wise, noticeably better than a 2C/4T harvested out of their 4C APU.

It's more expensive than the salvaged Raven Ridge dies.

However you are not technically wrong;
2400G => $169.99 * 0.6 => $101.99
Ryzen 3200U/R1606G => $100

A9-9425 in medium-size retails => $35.xx
A9-9425 in large-size retails => $29.xx
A6-9220C/A4-9120C are in the => $29 to $23 range.

Raven2 is not a cost-effective successor to Stoney. It's DOA for anything where Bristol/Stoney was priced.

 

[fleshconsumed]

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/A320TM-ITX/index.asp - 19V power brick power capability

and a 200ge - do we finally have an 'AM1 like' replacement?

No price listed yet but its close relative the A320M-ITX is still in the 85-95$ range. Too expensive for the kinds of projects I'd use an AM1 build for in the past.

I hope they price is closer to $60 but that may be optimistic.

SO-DIMM slots, only 1 LAN port and no PCIe slots whatsoever? Well that was disappointing.

My https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/AM1H-ITX/ motherboard has full sized DIMM slots and 16 lane PCIe slot. Works really well for pfSense - all I had to do was add some DDR3 sticks I already had lying around and add another LAN card. The A320TM-ITX won't cut it because there is no way to add another LAN card, plus SO-DIMMs are so annoying.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Notice the "TM" in that product code? Chances are, the "T" stands for Thin, as in, Thin Mini-ITX. That's why the board has such a short profile, and doesn't have a PCI-E x16 slot.

Look at their "normal ITX" product, I think that it will have what you are looking for.

 

[amd6502]

It's more expensive than the salvaged Raven Ridge dies.

However you are not technically wrong;
2400G => $169.99 * 0.6 => $101.99
Ryzen 3200U/R1606G => $100

A9-9425 in medium-size retails => $35.xx
A9-9425 in large-size retails => $29.xx
A6-9220C/A4-9120C are in the => $29 to $23 range.

Raven2 is not a cost-effective successor to Stoney. It's DOA for anything where Bristol/Stoney was priced.

Picasso-L should be similar in cost to BR. Under 2.5B transistors vs 3.1B for BR and a mere 1.2B for Stoney. Maybe 28nm is discounted enough vs 14nm that BR ends up a little cheaper. You're right it can't compete for bottom cost, and it's really more of a BR replacement than a Stoney replacement; Picasso-L is going for mainstream laptop. Will be 2x as much to produce as Stoney which is targeted at lower budget laptop.

While higher bin goes for mainstream, the bottom bin Picasso-L still will get much of that budget market. As for the true ultra bottom market, either acorn and atom socs (quad core) will slowly replace stoney or something like a 1.5B stoney++ (quadcore) will appear.

 

[fleshconsumed]

Notice the "TM" in that product code? Chances are, the "T" stands for Thin, as in, Thin Mini-ITX. That's why the board has such a short profile, and doesn't have a PCI-E x16 slot.

Look at their "normal ITX" product, I think that it will have what you are looking for.

But they don't have another "normal ITX" motherboard that can be powered by external 19V brick. The A320TM-ITX is the only one with 19V input on the back.

Anyway, I did not realize this was their "thin" line, makes sense why they would use SO-DIMMs and ditch the PCIe expansion slot. Just a bit disappointed there is no direct replacement for my AM1H-ITX yet.

 

[Abwx]

Review of the Asrock A300 :

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14251/asrock-deskmini-a300-review-an-affordable-diy-amd-ryzen-minipc

 

[DrMrLordX]

Not bad! Definitely better perf/watt than Hades Canyon in CBR15. Gaming performance isn't there, though.

 

[Abwx]

They should have used an Athlon 200/240GE for comparison, a 2400G is not what will be most bought for these kind of PCs, 35W APUs are more adequate, unfortunately stock 35W 4C/8T RR are about inexistent in the retail market, dunno if such a basic MB allow downclocking/downvolting a 65W APU.

 

[whm1974]

They should have used an Athlon 200/240GE for comparison, a 2400G is not what will be most bought for these kind of PCs, 35W APUs are more adequate, unfortunately stock 35W 4C/8T RR are about inexistent in the retail market, dunno if such a basic MB allow downclocking/downvolting a 65W APU.

I'm sure if there is enough demand for that, AMD will offer that.

 

[VirtualLarry]

It must be noted that the chassis design only allows for coolers up to 46mm in height - this means that the Wraith coolers (Stealth @ 54mm, Spire @ 71mm, and the Max @ 85m) are all unsupported. Users might be better off the optional cooler that ASRock advertises for use with the DeskMini A300.

I'm disappointed by this review.

I've seen PLENTY of user reviews, on Newegg and elsewhere, that the Wraith Stealth coolers, at least DO fit, if you take that plastic "shroud" with the plastic bit that says "AMD" on top off. And orient them properly.

I would have likely to see that mentioned, even if "officially unsupported", and with pictures of how it should be aligned, to get it to fit into the chassis properly.

The DeskMini A300 comes with an AMD A300 Promontory chipset. It is the most basic offering from AMD in the AM4 lineup. Overclocking is not supported. There are no USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports, and StoreMI (storage acceleration using a combination of PCIe and SATA drives) is also not supported. From the AIDA64 system report, we see that the second M.2 2280 port (on the underside of the board) is enabled by the x2 / x4 NVMe link from the processor. The remaining 12 free PCIe lanes from the Ryzen 5 2400G are configured as two x4 links for the M.2 slots on the top side (Wi-Fi and storage). The remaining x4 link is used in a x1 configuration for the Realtek LAN controller. All the rest of the I/O ports (USB and SATA) are direct passthrough from the SoC portion of the Ryzen 5 2400G.

That's a very interesting PCI-E configuration, and if they have x4 available for a LAN MAC/PHY, why not, in the future, release an "A300 Deskmini 10G" or "Premium", with an x4 10GbE LAN chip onboard, rather than the x1 RealTek 1GbE.

Or at the very least, consider a 2.5GbE RealTek, that just came out. It's time that we deserve a faster LAN NIC on our boards!

 

[Abwx]

I'm sure if there is enough demand for that, AMD will offer that.

They should use the average Picasso dies once they have enough quantity and release a 3GHz 4C/8T 35W locked SKU at say 100$ retail price, this way it wouldnt cannibalize their 2400G sales, methink that there would be much more demand than for the higher clocked Athlons 20X-GE.

Also those 12nm based chips have not only better perf/watt but also lower idle power, apparently due to better power management rather than silicon improvement for the latter parameter.

A glimpse of such a chip :

https://www.notebookcheck.net/ASUS-...n-RX-560X-SSD-FHD-Laptop-Review.418251.0.html

 

[Abwx]

Or at the very least, consider a 2.5GbE RealTek, that just came out. It's time that we deserve a faster LAN NIC on our boards!

The below is not faster but has two LAN :

https://www.computerbase.de/2019-04/asrock-ibox-r1000-nuc-amd-ryzen-r1000/

https://www.eepd.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Broschueren/EEPD_Single_Board_Computer_2019_1_3_Web.pdf