AMD has finally allowed us to list the lid on performance numbers for its latest APU (CPU with integrated graphics) – the Ryzen 7 5700G is a powerhouse of eight Zen 3 cores combined with Radeon graphics that make it the most powerful APU the company has ever produced.
APUs have long been some of the most interesting and competitive products the company offers too, stretching way back before the 2017 launch of Ryzen and the Zen architecture. The fact they combine powerful integrated graphics that are capable of 1080p gaming, means that you can do away with with a separate graphics card and build a cheaper gaming PC.
Ryzen 7 5700G: 8 cores and 16 threads; 3.8GHz base and 4.6GHz boost clock; 8 Radeon Vega GPU cores at 2GHz.
Ryzen 5 5600G: 6 cores and 12 threads; 3.9GHz base and 4.4GHz boost clock; 7 Radeon Vega GPU cores at 1.9GHz.
In a briefing with PCWorld prior to the keynote, AMD’s Robert Hallock said these chips are intended to stand in as more affordable, non-“X” alternatives to the existing $300 Ryzen 5 5600X and $450 Ryzen 7 5800X in AMD’s kick-ass Ryzen 5000 lineup (though these APUs are built around the “Cezanne” CPU architecture that debuted in AMD’s also-kick-ass Ryzen 5000 Mobile chips). The Ryzen 3 5300G offered in prebuilt systems isn’t being offered directly to PC builders partly due to AMD’s decision to prioritize higher-end processors while silicon shortages continue to ravage the technology industry, Hallock said.
Above you can see there are significant differences between the two new APUs in red, compared to the rest of the CPUs. Both have less L3 cache than the Ryzen 5 5600X, which will definitely hinder performance, although the Ryzen 7 5700G does at least match the Ryzen 7 5800X on L2 cache. However, it’s also worth noting that the new APUs do not support PCI-E 4.0.
But the two new 5000G APUs don’t zero in on the same market targets, and don’t aim to alleviate the pain at the really low end. They’re the priciest Ryzen-based APUs to date by MSRP, at $259 and $359 for the new Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips, respectively.
Both of the new APUs are 65-watt chips and come in retail-box packaging along with an AMD stock cooler. They work in the AMD AM4 socket that has been a staple of AMD’s Ryzen chips for years, but AMD did not yet divulge which AMD chipsets the new APUs will work with. You’ll also want to be sure your AM4 motherboard has video outputs; not all do, since most AMD Ryzen CPUs don’t have integrated graphics.
Rembrandt is AMD’s next-gen APU that is based on the enhanced Zen3+ architecture and integrates RDNA 2 GPUs. Utilizing both LPDDR5 and DDR5 capabilities, these APUs will be fabricated on TSMC’s 6nm process nodes. With a maximum of 8/16 cores/threads, these APUs are expected to join the Ryzen 6000 series.
DragonCrest and Pollock families are to fall under the Ultra-low TDP notebooks that are expected to release in 2022. The current AMD Ryzen line on AMD’s website is the AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX, which shares a lot of the same features as the successors we are seeing with the exception of updated LPDDR5/DDR5 memory capability and utilizing the newest Ryzen 6000 series of processors.