AMD Athlon 200GE: Benchmarking The $60 Zen+Vega Chip

First up were some Golang benchmarks where the Athlon 200GE does come in as a big improvement over the Athlon X4 950. The Athlon X4 950 has AM4 compatibility and was with the same motherboard and other components as the 200GE. The Athlon X4 950 Bristol Ridge I purchased for this round of testing since it's the same price as the Athlon 200GE ($60) and is a quad-core part clocked at 3.5GHz with 1MB of L4 cache and maximum turbo frequency of 3.8GHz. The X4 950 has higher clock speeds but isn't based on Zen, has no onboard graphics, and this 28nm processor has almost twice the power TDP rating (65 Watts).

In some benchmarks depending upon how well the workloads take advantage of Zen's modern architecture, the 200GE comes in as a minor boost over the X4 950 and the older A10-7850K / A10-7870K era parts. The Athlon 200GE could also easily surpass the older Core i3 parts from the Sandy Bridge to Haswell days as well as the Skylake Pentium G4400 in the multi-threaded benchmarks.

In workloads like GraphicsMagick that tend to do better on modern Intel microarchitectures, the Athlon 200GE tended to still come out ahead of the Pentium G4400 but behind the Core i3 7100. That more expensive processor as a reminder is dual-core plus Hyper Threading and has a 3.9GHz clock speed and 51 Watt TDP.

In some workloads this $60 Zen+Vega chip is performing around the speed of the Core i5 2500K SandyBridge and Core i5 3470 IvyBridge processors.