



AMD's Athlon brand name is still alive and kicking, more than 20 years after its original release back in June 1999. But while Athlon was once synonymous with AMD's premier performance desktop processors, the name has now been relegated to the company's entry-level "budget" processors

The latest entry into the family is the Athlon 3000G, which is AMD's first unlocked Athlon processor based on first-generation Zen microarchitecture. That means that this is a 14nm design, and it has a rated TDP of 35 watts. For those that like to overclock on an extreme budget, the Athlon 3000G comes from the factory with a base frequency of 3.5GHz. However, you should be able to easily boost frequencies given the maturity of AMD's original Zen architecture.

The Athlon 3000G is a 2-core/4-thread processor using the tried and true AM4 socket, which means that it should work on just about any motherboard that you throw at it, and it features an integrated Radeon Vega 3 GPU. Other specs include 192KB L1 cache, 1MB L2 cache, and 4MB of L3 cache.

Most importantly, however, is that the Athlon 3000G is priced at just $49, which will make it a popular option for bargain-basement systems where balls-to-the-wall performance isn't required at all times.

The Athlon 3000G is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum as its most recent sibling: the Ryzen 9 3950X. That 7nm Zen 2-based barnstormer comes equipped with a whopping 16 cores and 32 threads, and will demolish just about every processor in its price class ($749). You can read the Hot Hardware review of AMD's latest flagship processor right here.