PC World - USA (2019-07)

16 PCWorld JULY 2019

NEWS AMD RYZEN 3000 APU

should come in handy if you plan on

overclocking the chip.

NEW NAME, OLDER CORE

DESIGN

One thing to keep in mind as you review that

menu of AMD CPUs above: Even though the

Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G carry

“3000-series” model names, they’re not actually

AMD’s new leading edge 7nm Zen 2 cores.

That cutting-edge technology is reserved for the

new Ryzen 3000-series CPUs alone.

Instead, both Ryzen 3000 APUs are actually

based on AMD’s prior-gen 12nm cores, aka

Zen+, despite their model numbers.

Before you mount your outrage horse, this

isn’t actually new for AMD. AMD’s previous

Ryzen 2000 APUs were also introduced with

AMD’s original 14nm Zen cores just before

the company’s newer 12nm-based Zen+

cores were introduced, so it’s not a new

naming convention. The core technology in

AMD’s Ryzen APUs always lag a generation

behind the much pricier Ryzen CPUs.

And yes, please do pound your fist on the

table and demand an expensive new 7nm

process in a $99 chip, and then realize you

actually said it out loud.

INTEL STEPS UP THE

COMPETITION

What might be more of a problem for AMD is

how well the Ryzen 3000 APUs handle their

Intel equivalents. The original Ryzen APUs went

against far weaker 7th-gen Intel CPUs because

Intel’s newer 8th-gen chips would only work

on motherboards costing $120 or more.

With this launch, Intel’s 9th-gen chips can

slot into motherboards at a more reasonable

$55. So now, AMD’s quad-core APUs will

battle far more potent chips instead of

ho-hum dual-core CPUs.

While a Ryzen 3 3200G is probably going

to face a back and forth battle with a Core

i3-9100 in computing tasks, the quad-core

(with SMT) Ryzen 5 3400G will have to duke it

out against a six-core Core i5-9400.

WE SEE WHAT YOU DID

THERE, AMD...

We suspect that’s why AMD didn’t show off

benchmark charts in tasks that would load up

the CPU cores. Instead, we saw benchmarks

using PCMark 10 Extended, Adobe Premiere

GPU Accelerated, and SPECviewperf.

SPECviewperf is a graphics-intensive

professional benchmark. And, well, the name

“Adobe Premiere GPU Accelerated” pretty

much tells you what that test means too.

PCMark 10 Extended can lean either way but

with AMD failing to show Cinebench,

Blender, or other multi-core rendering tests

we can surmise it probably means the new

APUs are neck-and-neck with Intel’s chips

there—or possibly slower.

But it seems like the true strength of

AMD’s Ryzen APUs—their integrated Radeon

Vega graphics—remains a win. AMD released