If you check the retail listings, you’ll find the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G, but a Ryzen 3 chip is nowhere to be found. (There is a Ryzen 3 5300G, but it’s OEM only.) That’s also the case if you look at AMD’s non-graphics processors. The Ryzen 5000-series processors were released over a year ago at the end of 2020, and all that time only mid-range, high-end, and enthusiast-grade products were available.
At CES 2022, Intel announced a full line of desktop and laptop processors based on its Alder Lake processor design. Naturally, that includes Core i3, Pentium, and Celeron processors, as well as the H-series and B-series chipsets to go along with them. These cheap Intel chips and budget cards are a very attractive combination for people looking to build a new PC with the latest architectures, but without the dosh to hand out for a virtuous platform.
To translate, Enthusiastic Citizens claims we’ll soon see a Ryzen 7 4700, Ryzen 5 4600, and Ryzen 3 4300. The Ryzen 7 chip will have the full array of eight cores and 8MB of L3 cache, while the Ryzen 5 model will drop two cores, but will remain unchanged. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 3 4300 will lose two more cores as well as half its L3 cache, but might have a slightly higher base clock. These chips will allegedly be scaled down from AMD’s Renoir silicon to create “Renoir-X”.
What is Renoir-X? Well, it’s apparently AMD’s Renoir APU die used in the Ryzen 4000 mobile and desktop parts, just with the graphics cut out. Indeed, besides the Ryzen 4000 moving parts, there were also Ryzen 4000 desktop processors, although they were only available on OEM machines. Renoir suffered the same kind of cuts as Cézanne compared to his non-GPU brethren, but even more severe; it entirely loses 3/4 of its L3 cache compared to Matisse, Zen 2-based desktop processors without graphics.
Enthusiastic Citizens notes that the model numbers in their information are only their own guesses, but the specs should be correct. In another article, he also specifies the TDP of these processors at 65W, which is typical of AMD’s mainstream desktop processors. Asked by another Bilibili poster what exactly these releases are for at this late stage, Mr. Citizens replies that they will be cheap and eliminate the old silicon inventory that AMD keeps.
Given that Renoir’s CPU cores are older generation Zen 2, rather than Zen 3, we find it hard to believe these parts will be compelling buys over even AMD’s Ryzen 3000 CPUs, without talk about Intel’s low-end Alder Lake models. . (There’s a certain irony to be enjoyed in the fact that a “4000” CPU can be cheaper than a “3000” CPU.) Yet, as the old adage goes, “there’s no such thing as a bad products, just bad prices”.
There are many older Socket AM4 motherboards and OEM machines out there, and these chips should fit in almost every existing Socket AM4 motherboard, assuming they come to market. Priced right, a Renoir-X CPU could be a cheap path to a relatively modern CPU for people still stuck on older Core i processors or AMD Phenom or FX systems.
