AMD Raven Ridge Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G Review

Introduction

While AMD's Ryzen series of CPUs were highly successful, it is undeniable that they were unable to cover the whole PC market, leaving behind the lucrative integrated graphics market while the company focused on their high-end ambitions. 

Summit Ridge was an extremely versatile product, offering an 8-core single-die design which covered a range of markets. The desktop market used a single-die design with 4-8 core offerings, creating their Ryzen 3-7 series of products, with dual-die 8-16 core products with their Threadripper series of high-end desktop (HEDT) processors and four-die CPUs with up to 32 cores and 64 threads with their enterprise-grade EPYC series of server CPUs.

AMD has bet heavily on versatile product designs, allowing them to compete with the development budget or Intel with a mass-produced core design, with the only flaw with this approach being the lack of products with integrated graphics.  

In the OEM desktop market, it is thought that around a third of systems ship without a dedicated GPU, leaving a massive gap in the market where Ryzen couldn't tap into at launch. This market segment calls for another versatile CPU design, which AMD has now delivered with Raven Ridge. 

Raven Ridge covers both the mobile CPU market and consumer desktop segments, cutting down on unneeded aspects of high-end Ryzen to create a product that was more suitable for low-power mobile and cost-effective desktop systems. Raven Ridge is a Ryzen CPU design with a single CCX, none of the interconnects for multi-chip modules and a Vega graphics component, creating AMD's most advanced APU to date. 

Technical Specifications

When compared to its Summit Ridge/Ryzen 1000 series counterparts, the Raven Ridge/ Ryzen 2000G series offers increased clock speeds, a move to a single-CCX design and support for increase memory clock speeds. This is discounting Raven Ridge's most notable addition, which is the inclusion of integrated graphics, which means that Ryzen system can now be built without a dedicated GPU. 

The inclusion of an integrated GPU is a great thing to see given today's GPU pricing, where demand for cryptocurrencies has increased raised the price of GPUs significantly.  

When looking at AMD's pricing for Raven Ridge, it seems like AMD is giving their users a free iGPU with this generation, with MSRPs that are the same as their last-generation counterparts, with no increase in MSRP or TDP. From a value standpoint, it is hard to argue with AMD's pricing here, especially given this product's increased clock speeds. 

The move to Raven Ridge does not come without sacrifices, like the decrease in Raven Ridge's L3 cache size, which will affect specific workloads, as well as Raven Ridge's lower number of PCIe lanes for graphics. Both Summit Ridge and Raven Ridge processors offer 4 PCIe lanes for M.2 storage and four PCIe lanes for chipset connectivity, with Summit Ridge offering 16 extra lanes for PCIe connectivity (for dedicated graphics) while Raven Ridge only provides eight PCIe lanes for graphics. 

These downgrades are not huge concerns for most users, as eight PCIe lanes are enough for most modern graphics cards. Anyone that needs more than eight PCIe lanes will likely be using a dedicated GPU, which means that standard Ryzen is a better product for them, and anyone using a beefy enough GPU to complain about having only eight PCIe lanes should be investing in a higher end CPU, simple.