A recent GeekBench database submission has given us a sneak peek at something AMD has been planning. It looks like AMD might be taking a leaf out of Intel’s book when it comes to their naming structure.
Inspired by Intel
Their new processor has been named Athlon Gold, seemingly follows on from Intel’s decision to name products “Gold” and “Silver” to help customers distinguish between processor performance.
Intel distinguishes its processors based on microarchitecture performance. However, while Intel does this for its Xeon class server processors, AMD will be doing it for their entry-level Athlon series instead.
While being a seemingly small matter of naming CPUs, these similarities could be seen as a statement or a challenge from AMD to Intel.
Athlon Gold Processors Already On Their Way To Laptops
The Athlon Gold 3150U processor has already been used in an HP “17-ca2xxx” laptop benchmark. This looks like a prototype for an upcoming HP laptop. Given that it’s got “Gold” in the name, it’s fair to say this performance will set out to rival mobile variants of the Pentium Gold which most full-sized notebooks operate on.
The benchmark also shows that the AMD Athlon Gold is going to be a “Raven Ridge” AMD mobile-CPU. This processor contains 2-cores and 4-threads, using a Radeon graphics card which looks like a variant of AMD’s “Vega 3”.
Athlon Gold vs Pentium Gold
How does the Athlon Gold perform in comparison to the Pentium Gold?
The base frequency of the Athlon Gold is thought to be 2.40GHz with 3.30Ghz boost clock speed. That means this processor does, in fact, look a lot better than Intel’s Pentium Gold which has a rated clock speed of just 1.60GHz.
The Athlon chip also scored 3,559 single-core points and 7,336 points in the multi-core test which also surpasses what the Pentium Gold is capable of. Intel’s Pentium Gold scored a surprisingly low 368 points in single-core and 884 in multi-core tests.
Final Word
When the core count of Intel Pentium Gold and AMD’s Athlon Gold are held up side by side, it does show that AMD has made some great progress with processors in recent years.
With the “Gold” label, it wouldn’t be a wild assumption to say that there could be a “Silver” processor on the way too. It certainly looks like AMD is taking its rivalry with Intel seriously. With the Athlon Gold entry knocking the competition so drastically, we can’t wait to see where AMD goes with this.