At the beginning of this week, AMD officially introduced the first processor in the Athlon series based on Zen architecture, the Athlon 200GE to compete with Intel’s low-end solutions that are dominated by the Pentium brand.
Contrary to Ryzen processors having an unlocked multiplier, AMD’s Zen-based Athlon processors are shipped without overclocking support, making them the first Zen-based processors with such a limitation. Remarkably, Intel CPUs of a similar price do not support overclocking either.
The Athlon 200GE will cost about 55 Euros, making it ideal for builders looking for inexpensive PCs, especially for those who need a simple office machine for word processing, Internet browsing, and video playback. Such systems are aimed at users who are not interested in overclocking, which makes it a useless feature for most of them. In addition to all this, it is important to emphasize that if AMD’s processors allow overclocking by the BCLK, it might not be impossible to overclock these new chips with a locked multiplier.
AMD has also confirmed that two more Athlon processors, the Athlon 240GE and the Athlon 220GE will come onto the market this year, but nothing is currently known about their specifications. We expect these processors to be variants of the Athlon 200GE with higher speed, although AMD could also launch a low TDP quad core that would be between the Ryzen 3 2200G and the Athlon 200GE.
What do you think of the new Zen-based AMD Athlon and do you think it should come with the unlocked multiplier?