AMD rolls out new Athlon, Athlon Pro and Ryzen Pro processors to compete in low end market

Laurent Giret

AMD unveiled today a new family of desktop CPUs that include the “Zen” core-based Athlon and and Athlon Pro processors plus 2nd gen Ryzen Pro CPUs for business users. Just like Intel is keeping the “Pentium” brand around for some of its cheaper CPUs, AMD’s Athlon brand is still alive with processors offering “responsive and reliable computing for a wide range of experiences,” the chip maker said.

For consumers, the Athlon 200GE desktop processor is a dual core chip with integrated Radeon Vega Graphics. AMD claims that the $55 processor offers up to 67 percent more GPU performance and up to 2X greater power efficiency than the competition. For the commercial market, AMD is also launching the new Athlon PRO 200GE processor which has similar specs but integrates AMD’s GuardMI security technology.

Last but not least, AMD is launching three 2nd Generation Ryzen Pro desktop processors: the six-core Ryzen 5 Pro 2600 CPU and the eight-core Ryzen Pro 2700 and Rysen Pro 2700X CPUs. According to the company, the latter delivers up to 18% better performance than the competition and up to 10% higher multiprocessing performance than the 1st gen Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X

Consumers will be able to purchase the AMD Athlon 200GE processor starting September 18, and the company also has the Athlon 220GE and 240GE CPUs in the pipeline for later this year. As for the Athlon Pro 200GE and 2nd Gen Ryzen Pro desktop processors, you should start seeing them in new PCS from Dell, HP and Lenovo very soon.