AMD Revives Zen+: Two New Processors Based on 7-Year-Old Architecture

AMD continues to dust off architectures from the past to expand its CPU offerings. The company has introduced two new models in the Ryzen 3000U family, a platform belonging to the Picasso series based on Zen+ architecture, originally introduced in 2019. This news seems particularly unusual considering that the manufacturer already has commercial solutions based on the newer Zen 4 and Zen 5 architectures.

The newcomers are the Ryzen 3 3100U and Ryzen 5 3501U, two processors aimed primarily at the entry-level notebook segment, characterized by extremely low power consumption thanks to a TDP of 15W.

The most curious model from a technical perspective is probably the new Ryzen 3 3100U, a CPU that adopts a very essential configuration consisting of 2 cores and 2 threads. Unlike many Ryzen solutions seen in recent years, the processor does not even integrate support for simultaneous multithreading (SMM). The operating frequencies include a base clock of 1.9 GHz and a maximum boost frequency of 3.2 GHz, accompanied by 4 MB of L3 cache.

Alongside this solution is the Ryzen 5 3501U, which positions itself slightly higher due to a configuration of 4 cores and 8 threads. In this case, the frequencies reach 2.1 GHz at base and 3.7 GHz in boost mode, maintaining the same 4 MB of L3 cache. Both processors integrate a Radeon Vega 8 GPU with 8 Compute Units and an operating frequency of up to 1.2 GHz.

The introduction of these products highlights how AMD continues to also serve the budget segment of the notebook market. Although the technical specifications are far from those offered by the more recent platforms, the new CPUs could find a place in extremely low-cost laptops. In this context, a reliable, proven, and optimized architecture is certainly a smart choice.