In a move seemingly designed to spur sales of older mainstream AM4 motherboards, AMD is reportedly spinning production of its 12nm Zen+ Ryzen 3000G APUs. According to a report on China's Board Channels (via VideoCardz), AMD plans to produce as many as 30,000 new 3000G chips. It's not clear, however, whether the specs of these APUs will change at all or if this will turn out to be new stock of the existing Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G.
For those whose memories might need a refresh regarding 2019-era mainstream CPU details, the 3000G APU lineup consisted of just two chips, the Ryzen 3 3200G and the Ryzen 5 3400G. Both featured four physical cores, while the higher-end 3400G had SMT enabled for eight available threads. Both featured Vega graphics, while the 3400G's featured more compute units (11) and a faster clock speed of up to 1400 MHz. And importantly for anyone considering pairing one of these chips with a decently capable modern graphics card, both models were limited to just eight PCIe 3.0 lanes.
While we were fairly positive about the 3400G when we reviewed it in 2020, calling it "a great niche part for low-cost systems built around integrated graphics," that's not exactly the case in 2023. The 3400G is still readily available, but at about $127, it's hard to argue when the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5 5600G sells on Amazon for the same price. Clearly, there's newer and better competition for the best CPU for gaming these days, even if you are looking for something that's decidedly on the budget end.
Whether or not AMD makes any changes to the clock speeds or other features for these 'new' Zen+ processors, clearly, some price adjustments are in order if it hopes to sell this dated silicon – and help move some old motherboards in the process. While much has been said about the high prices of current-gen hardware (whether that's Ryzen 7000 or Nvidia's current crop of GPUs), it's unclear whether there's much of a market for 2019-era budget APUs unless perhaps the asking price is going to be relatively low.
