AMD’s Zen-based Athlon 200GE is not overclockable – More Athlon CPUs are coming later this year

Earlier this week, AMD officially revealed their first Zen-based Athlon series processor, taking on Intel in the low-cost desktop market, an area which has been dominated by the Pentium brand for quite some time. 

Unlike AMD Zen-based Ryzen processors, which all feature an unlocked multiplier, AMD’s Zen-based Athlon processors will ship without support for overclocking, making them the first Zen-based processors with such a limitation. 

The Athlon 200GE is designed with a price point of $55 in mind, making it ideal for budget PC builders, especially those who want a basic office machine for word processing, internet browsing and video playback. These kinds of systems are not built with overclocking in mind, making it a useless feature for most perspective Athlon users. It is also worth noting that similarly priced CPUs from Intel also lack support for overclocking. 

 

 

AMD has also confirmed that two additional Athlon processors will be released later this year, the Athlon 240GE and Athlon 220GE, though at this time it is unknown how powerful these new processors will be. These processors are expected to be higher-clocked variants of the Athlon 200GE, though AMD could also release a low-TDP quad-core that sits between the Ryzen 3 2200G and the Athlon 200GE. We will learn more about these future Athlon processors sometime in Q4.   

 

	Cores/ Threads	Base Clock Speed	Boost Clock Speed	Smart Prefetch  Cache (L2+L3)	iGPU	OC Support?	TDP
Ryzen 7 2700X	8/16	3.7GHz	4.3GHz	20 (4+16)	N/A	Yes	105W
Ryzen 7 2700	8/16	3.2GHz	4.1GHz	20 (4+16)	N/A	Yes	65W
Ryzen 5 2600X	6/12	3.6GHz	4.2GHz	19 (3+16)	N/A	Yes	95W
Ryzen 5 2600	6/12	3.4GHz	3.9GHz	19 (3+16)	N/A	Yes	65W
Ryzen 5 2400G	4/8	3.6GHz	3.9GHz	6 (2+4)	Vega 11	Yes	65W
Ryzen 3 2200G	4/4	3.5GHz	3.7GHz	6 (2+4)	Vega 8	Yes	65W
Athlon 240GE	??	??	??	??	??	No?	??
Athlon 220GE	??	??	??	??	??	No?	??
Athlon 200GE	2/4	3.2GHz	–	5 (1+4)	Vega 3	No	35W

  

 

To clear up some potential misinformation, AMD is not backing down on the promise to release every Ryzen processor with an unlocked multiplier. There is a difference between AMD’s Zen core architecture and their Ryzen processor branding. Zen processors can ship without an unlocked multiplier on AMD’s AM4 socket, but only if the CPU lacks AMD’s Ryzen branding, which is why these locked processors are called Athlons. 

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