AMD is due to release a pair of CPUs based on an architecture released over 7 years ago, but are they interesting?

AMD is gearing up to release a pair of Ryzen 3000 series 'Picasso' CPUs. But they aren't based on the Zen 4 or even Zen 3 or 2 architectures, but the Zen+ architecture that was released back in 2019. The two chips come with Radeon Vega graphics and are being targeted at entry-level laptops with the FP5 socket. As they are FP5 chips, they don't have retail pricing, and are clearly being released to support OEMs. It's safe to say they will be far cheaper than AMD's Ryzen AI 400 chips.

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The Ryzen 3 3100U is a very basic chip by modern standards. It's a dual-core chip without hyperthreading. It has a boost clock of 3.2GHz, 4MB of L3 cache, and a default 15W TDP. It has an 8-core Vega 8 GPU which was actually highly regarded back in its day. Suffice to say this is a chip that won't win any benchmark races in 2026 and it won't be suitable for anything outside of basic Windows tasks. But, it's a well-established architecture that will be easy for OEMs to incorporate into 'new' designs.

The second chip is more powerful. The Ryzen 5 3501U is a 4-core, 8-thread design with a boost clock of up to 3.7GHz. It has the same Vega 8 graphics as the 3100U, but its higher thread count makes it more suitable for multitasking.

The fact that these two chips are being released at all is a sign of the times. They are built using TSMC's 12nm process. 12nm is far from the cutting edge, and it doesn't face competition from the red-hot AI-induced demand for advanced process nodes. That means they'll be far cheaper to manufacture. But how cheap will the end products be? They still need memory and storage and those are products that are anything but cheap.