AMD Athlon 3000G budget processor may be on its way

Looks like there's a new member of the AMD Picasso line-up if a listing by Gigabyte is anything to go on.

Both Gigabyte and Arrow Electronics have listed an AMD Athlon 3000G along with a few key specs. By being a member of the Picasso family, it's likely created with GlobalFoundries' 12nm manufacturing process and provides AMD's Zen+ computing and Vega graphics microarchitectures. 

Specs aren't confirmed, but Toms Hardware has conducted a little digging, and it looks likely that the Athlon 3000G offers two cores and four threads, therefore being just what you'd expect from a budget APU. It also looks likely to have 1MB and 4MB of L2 and L3 cache, respectively. Expect a base 3.5GHz alongside all that, making it 100MHz faster than the Athlon Pro 300GE, which shares the same Zen+ blueprint but within the same 35W TDP design. 

Gigabyte also lists the Athlon 3000G with an iGPU that runs at 1,100MHz with Arrow Electronics listing it with AMD's Radeon Vega 3 graphics. 

So, is this actually going to happen? It seems pretty likely. In the past, ASRock has listed the Athlon 320GE as well as the only desktop Athlon APU in the Picasso lineup, the Athlon 300GE, before they were released. By that logic, it seems reasonable to conclude that history is repeating itself when it comes to new processor announcements from AMD. 

Of course, the Athlon 3000G and Athlon 320GE do look near-identical with matching specifications and B1 revision, so could this just be a case of rebranding? That's a reasonable assumption to make, too. It's not uncommon for AMD to rebrand its processors or graphic chips, presumably to ensure consumers feel like they're getting the latest product when it's actually more of a very minor tweak. 

It's also a great way to bolster the Picasso line-up easily. Currently, there's only the Athlon Pro 300GE representing the desktop Athlon APUs. Otherwise, the desktop Picasso line-up is mostly made up of the Ryzen line such as the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G. So, it makes sense to introduce a non-Pro version, too. 

Whatever the reason, we'd be very surprised if an Athlon 3000G dual-core processor doesn't emerge fairly soon.