AMD Ryzen 8000G to feature Zen 4(c) and RDNA3 architectures with the 8700G/8600G/8500G and 8300G SKUs

[filpo]

Summary

AMD's recent AGESA update shows support for desktop APUs and a recent update for the X670 mobos from ASUS ROG and Asrock. And now we have info from Twitter (or X) giving us an idea of what the Ryzen 8000 APUs will hold in terms of specs

Quotes

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Post below translated: 

AMD has recently updated the AGESA Combo AM5 PI 1.1.0.0 firmware with increased support for AM5 APU processors. According to Taiwan's motherboard manufacturer to HKEPC, AMD has provided ES samples for testing, and received news that it is likely to be named Ryzen 8000G series, and there are currently known to be 4 SKUs, including Ryzen 3 8300G, Ryzen 5 8500G, Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G, as well as a PRO version of the commercial model.

 

According to sources, the Ryzen 8000G series will have two different cores. The Ryzen 3 8300G and Ryzen 5 8500G will feature Phoenix 2 cores with a Zen4 + Zen4c big-core small-core design. The 8300G will have 4 cores (1C+3c / 8T), the 8500G will have 6 cores (2C+4c / 12T), and the graphics core will only have 4 RDNA3 CUs.

 

And the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G will feature the Phoenix all-Zen 4 core. The 8600G will have 6 cores (6C/12T) and the 8700G will have 8

 

Quote

AMD is also preparing two models based on the Phoenix2 die, also known as Small Phoenix. This APU was recently introduced by AMD for the affordable laptop segment, and it’s the first monolithic design to employ Zen4 and smaller Zen4c cores. The Ryzen 3 8300G would feature the same configuration as the mobile Ryzen 3 7440U, which is 1x Zen4 core and 3x Zen4c cores, while the Ryzen 5 8500G would have 2 Zen4 cores and 4 Zen4c cores. Both models are said to feature 4 CU RDNA3 graphics.

 

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Specs simplified:

My thoughts

We don't have clock speeds yet but these specs are already looking promising with a good bump in CUs for the 8700G. Will be interesting to see how the 8500G and the 8300G performs with it's Zen 4c cores. However it's confusing as on BIOS updates the chips have been seen as 7000G CPUs but in this twitter (or X) post, it's been called 8000G (however it is a rumour)

 

Sources

AMD Ryzen 8000G "Phoenix" desktop series to feature 8700G/8600G/8500G and 8300G SKUs with Zen4(c)/RDNA3 architectures - VideoCardz.com

ASRock first to release AGESA 1.1.0.0 for its X670 motherboards with improved Ryzen 7000G "Phoenix" support - VideoCardz.com

ASUS releases new X670 Beta BIOS with Ryzen 7000G "Phoenix" desktop APU support - VideoCardz.com

Edited November 8, 2023 by filpo
More thoughts added

[Agall]

I've seen a few reports on this, I'll be glad to see it.

 

I will be buying the highest model day 1 and swapping the R5 7600 in my living room PC for it. APUs are just a lot of fun.

[cmndr]

I'm ready for some SUPER awesome miniPCs at a very reasonable price. 

[AbydosOne]

Zen4C is neater than I think most people realize. It's literally the same as a Zen4 core, but with everything optimized for space. Because it's smaller, it doesn't clock as high (heat density), but aside from that, it's the same IPC as a normal Zen4 core. No ThreadScheduler, no bigLITTLE, just different speed cores, which is something we've been dealing with for a few generations now.

 

 

[YoungBlade]

The Ryzen 7 7840HS does very well in 1080p gaming with its iGPU, but it seems to be power limited a lot of the time, as it's a laptop chip. Hopefully, the R7 8700G is fully unlocked like its predecessors so that it can be given more power.

 

Given how the 7840HS performs, I think we may be able to see performance around the level of a GTX 1060 or RX 580 with the iGPU overclocked, which will be insane for an APU. Although whether it will make sense for budget gaming comes down entirely to the price - it's probably going to be way too expensive.

[cmndr]

6 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Zen4C is neater than I think most people realize. It's literally the same as a Zen4 core, but with everything optimized for space. Because it's smaller, it doesn't clock as high (heat density), but aside from that, it's the same IPC as a normal Zen4 core. No ThreadScheduler, no bigLITTLE, just different speed cores, which is something we've been dealing with for a few generations now.

 

Yep. And if you take it to the extreme it won't win on ST but 3x the Zen4c cores will likely beat 1x the Zen5 cores on MT despite similarish production costs. I'm making a lot of assumptions here but the point generally holds if the goal is to get good MT for pretty cheap. 

 

[starsmine]

.... 8000?
AMD plz. keep it 7000. We just reset the names for desktop. 

 

[GOTSpectrum]

Honestly, this is really underwhelming to me. I was hoping with the ever-increasing cost of GPUs AMD would give us a real APU to challenge low-end GPUs but that doesn't seem to be what they want 

[filpo]

Just now, starsmine said:

.... 8000?
AMD plz. keep it 7000. We just reset the names for desktop. 

 

They might be doing what they did for something like Ryzen 6000 (where it was only laptop cpus) and so here it will still be zen 4 and new zen 4c cores but they will be optimised for APUs. Assumingly it'll be the same socket but yea it's confusing

[Helpful Tech Witch]

37 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

Honestly, this is really underwhelming to me. I was hoping with the ever-increasing cost of GPUs AMD would give us a real APU to challenge low-end GPUs but that doesn't seem to be what they want 

I mean, up to 12 rdna 3 cus seems like its quite the challange to low end gpus, no? theyre never gonna compare to like even a 4060 class card, but i dont think anyone really expected them too? 12 rdna 3 cus would trounce a vega 11 though, which is all thats needed.

They compare to someone going back and using a like 1660 or 1060 as their lower end card, not new gpus.

[GOTSpectrum]

8 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

I mean, up to 12 rdna 3 cus seems like its quite the challange to low end gpus, no? theyre never gonna compare to like even a 4060 class card, but i dont think anyone really expected them too? 12 rdna 3 cus would trounce a vega 11 though, which is all thats needed.

They compare to someone going back and using a like 1660 or 1060 as their lower end card, not new gpus.

12... huh I missed that, would have liked 16 but 12 is certainly nothing is shake a stick at 

[wONKEyeYEs]

53 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

12 rdna 3 cus

"the 8500G will have 6 cores (2C+4c / 12T), and the graphics core will only have 4 RDNA3 CUs."

[filpo]

1 minute ago, wONKEyeYEs said:

"the 8500G will have 6 cores (2C+4c / 12T), and the graphics core will only have 4 RDNA3 CUs."

The specs simplified in one of the quotes gives the whole story 

[Helpful Tech Witch]

2 hours ago, wONKEyeYEs said:

"the 8500G will have 6 cores (2C+4c / 12T), and the graphics core will only have 4 RDNA3 CUs."

the 8700g though. 12 cu rdna3

thats why i compared it to vega 11, its the highest end option.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

3 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

12... huh I missed that, would have liked 16 but 12 is certainly nothing is shake a stick at 

its not perfect but 12 cus is like, still a lot better than a vega 11 so ive got 0 issues

 

[GOTSpectrum]

3 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

its not perfect but 12 cus is like, still a lot better than a vega 11 so ive got 0 issues

 

Oh certainly, it's going in the right direction that's for sure

[GOTSpectrum]

6 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

the 8700g though. 12 cu rdna3

thats why i compared it to vega 11, its the highest end option.

It's crazy how long Vega endured to say how mediocre it actually was in most situations. It's a bandwidth hog of a architecture which was one of the issues, needing HBM2 on the GPUs to be fed well enough... 

 

 

[leadeater]

21 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

It's crazy how long Vega endured to say how mediocre it actually was in most situations. It's a bandwidth hog of a architecture which was one of the issues, needing HBM2 on the GPUs to be fed well enough... 

Vega in APUs are actually tweaked quite a lot, more than once too I believe. So it's kind of not but still is Vega, personally I think it should of gotten it's own architecture name to better portray that.

[WereCat]

56 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

its not perfect but 12 cus is like, still a lot better than a vega 11 so ive got 0 issues

 

Chances are that it will still be limited by memory bandwidth even with fast DDR5

[Helpful Tech Witch]

6 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Chances are that it will still be limited by memory bandwidth even with fast DDR5

still. you cant argue its not gonna be really good still. Vega 11 is teh fastest desktop apu you can get right now. even crappy rdna 3 with 12 cus will be much better than that

 

58 minutes ago, GOTSpectrum said:

It's crazy how long Vega endured to say how mediocre it actually was in most situations. It's a bandwidth hog of a architecture which was one of the issues, needing HBM2 on the GPUs to be fed well enough... 

 

 

yea but its still miles ahead of the best intel has to offer on the desktop, so amd hasnt really had a reason to upgrade it much

 

[GOTSpectrum]

2 minutes ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

yea but its still miles ahead of the best intel has to offer on the desktop, so amd hasnt really had a reason to upgrade it much

It's just a shame that they didn't keep pushing... Think where we could be by now if they improved it by a decent margin every year since the 2000G series 

[porina]

8 hours ago, Helpful Tech Witch said:

yea but its still miles ahead of the best intel has to offer on the desktop, so amd hasnt really had a reason to upgrade it much

Before Zen 4, Intel desktop iGPUs were far better than AMD desktop iGPUs since AMD didn't have any. For clarity, I'm comparing the full desktop CPUs, which would be the chiplet based ones, not APUs with cut down features.

 

Intel doesn't provide big iGPUs on desktop on the basis that anyone that cared about performance would get a dGPU. Similarly now that AMD have joined in on Zen 4, chiplet iGPUs are much smaller than APU iGPUs so they have the same strategy in that space. The only advantage AMD has is the offering of APUs which have comparatively bigger iGPUs at the cost of reduced CPU performance.

 

8 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

It's just a shame that they didn't keep pushing... Think where we could be by now if they improved it by a decent margin every year since the 2000G series 

What would they upgrade to/with? The options are limited. More GPU cores? Faster GPU cores? More bandwidth somehow? New GPU architecture? APUs are balanced on cost and power so that doesn't leave much scope. It is relatively easy to scale the compute side of iGPU but scaling bandwidth for it is harder. Cache could work but it is very costly.

[WereCat]

31 minutes ago, porina said:

 

 

What would they upgrade to/with? The options are limited. More GPU cores? Faster GPU cores? More bandwidth somehow? New GPU architecture? APUs are balanced on cost and power so that doesn't leave much scope. It is relatively easy to scale the compute side of iGPU but scaling bandwidth for it is harder. Cache could work but it is very costly.

Would be interesting to see how X3D APU would perform if most of the extra L3 would be for the iGPU. Though I don't think it makes much sense for desktop but it may be a banger in handhelds.

[leadeater]

30 minutes ago, porina said:

It is relatively easy to scale the compute side of iGPU but scaling bandwidth for it is harder. Cache could work but it is very costly.

You'd realistically have to go with LPDDR(X) and scale up the memory controller which basically means BGA systems not LGA socketed aka something people here do not want.

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

You'd realistically have to go with LPDDR(X) and scale up the memory controller which basically means BGA systems not LGA socketed aka something people here do not want.

They could put the LPDDR on the organic interposer substrate (like apple) but still use a socket from the interposer to the motherboard.