Intel takes on AMD's budget-focused Athlon Zen with the new Pentium G5620

Forward-looking: Set to release in March, Intel announced its new line of Pentium Gold CPUs. At the top of the list is the G5620, a dual core chip with Hyper-Threading, and the first Pentium CPU to launch with a 4 GHz clock speed. The G5620 is expected to retail around $100 and compete directly with AMD's budget-focused processors.

Intel is bringing new Pentium Gold processors to market in an attempt to claim back low-end consumer market share from AMD's Athlon Zen. The top SKU, the G5620, will be the first Pentium with a 4 GHz clock speed out of the box, and will pack two cores with hyper-threading and a 65W TDP. The G5620 will replace the G5600 at the top of Intel's low-end product stack, offering a 100 MHz boost over its predecessor.

The budget Coffee Lake line of CPUs also includes the Pentium G5420 (3.8 GHz), G5600T (3.3 GHz, 35W TDP), and G5420T (3.2 GHz, 35W TDP), all of which are dual core with four threads. Three Celeron SKUs were also revealed, the G4950, G4930, and G4930T, and will carry two cores without hyperthreading.

The chips are built on the same 14 nm++ node that the rest of the Coffee Lake processors utilize. The Pentium G5620 will feature integrated UHD 630 graphics, with the lower-end CPUs featuring the UHD 610 variant.

The flagship G5620 is expected to retail somewhere around $100 at launch in March, which places it just below the i3-8100 on Intel's CPU hierarchy. The i3-8100 is a true quad-core CPU without hyper-threading, but is clocked lower at 3.6 GHz. The G5620 can support dual-channel DDR4 up to 64GB, has 512 KB of L2 cache, and 4 MB of L3 cache.

The $100 price tag is up slightly from previous generations. The much-loved G4560 launched in 2017 at $64, which resulted in i3 sales plummeting since the Pentium chip was roughly 10% slower at less than half the price. Intel likely raised the price of the G5620 to protect sales of its current i3 chips.

AMD recently released the Athlon 200GE and 240GE, with both offering two cores, four threads, and Radeon Vega 3 graphics for $50 and $60, respectively. The 200GE is able to outperform the $119 i3-8100 in some CPU tests, and routinely beat it in integrated graphics tests. While Intel isn't pricing the G5620 as low as the Athlon Zen CPUs, we can likely expect performance similar to the i3-8100 with a slightly lower price tag.