Friday, March 22nd 2024
AMD Debuts Ryzen 7 8700F & Ryzen 5 8400F SKUs at Beijing AI PC Summit
AMD's Beijing AI PC Innovation Summit served as introduction point for a Chinese market launch of "Hawk Point" Ryzen 8040 mobile series and 8000G desktop processors—news coverage has, so far, focused on that rollout as well as a teasing of next-gen "Strix Point" processors. HXL/9550pro has put a spotlight on an easy-to-miss presentation slide—their social media post revealed the existence of new budget-friendly Ryzen 8000F CPUs. Team Red seems to be preparing two China-exclusive SKUs: Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F—not many details were revealed on-stage, so reporters have played a guessing game with speculated technical information. Industry experts believe that the 8700F is an iGPU-less version of AMD's "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8700G APU—utilizing the same 8 core and 16 thread configuration, but missing the Radeon 780M integrated graphics solution.
The lower-end SKU is a more perplexing product, since AMD did not elaborate much during "budget" product unveilings—VideoCardz put its thinking hat on for this one: "meanwhile, the 8400F might be harder to guess, as the name sits between 8500G and 8300G, both featuring vastly different configurations. An educated guess would be 6 cores and 12 threads, possibly with two Zen 4 and four Zen 4c cores." The "F" model suffix gained attention last year—courtesy of Team Red's Ryzen 5 7500F CPU. This iGPU-less "Raphael" Zen 4 SKU was initially released as a Chinese market exclusive, but eventually headed West as an option for system integrators.
Sources:
HXL Tweet, AMD News China, Tom's Hardware, VideoCardz
The lower-end SKU is a more perplexing product, since AMD did not elaborate much during "budget" product unveilings—VideoCardz put its thinking hat on for this one: "meanwhile, the 8400F might be harder to guess, as the name sits between 8500G and 8300G, both featuring vastly different configurations. An educated guess would be 6 cores and 12 threads, possibly with two Zen 4 and four Zen 4c cores." The "F" model suffix gained attention last year—courtesy of Team Red's Ryzen 5 7500F CPU. This iGPU-less "Raphael" Zen 4 SKU was initially released as a Chinese market exclusive, but eventually headed West as an option for system integrators.
19 Comments on AMD Debuts Ryzen 7 8700F & Ryzen 5 8400F SKUs at Beijing AI PC Summit
Let. People. In. Give people affordability, give people selection. The entry bar is too high and there are too few options - lower. It. Down.
I would really want to see AM5 in a better place for entry level soon.
Another issue w/ AM5 boards is lacking expansion.
I 'get' that most people just need M.2 and a single x16 slot but, this is an unwelcome change for those of us that utilize PCIe's forwards and backwards compatibility for expansion
(Sound Cards, Capture Cards, USB 3+ cards, >GBe NICs, etc.)
Beyond that, to my knowledge, there is no 'lane sharing' (not sure about the Ryzen 8000G series).
NtM, all of the currently-offered chipsets are limited to an 4.0x4 lane interface to the CPU.
IMO, another big reason for AM5 being entirely unattractive for X570 on AM4 owners; it offers little in platform upgrade(s)
Maybe, my feelings will change w/ whatever next-gen chipset AMD-ASM releases...It's more like Exit-in-Rear level. :laugh:
A B550 board is much more featureful (overall), comparable in I/O capabilities, and offers a much lower platform cost.
(with likelihood of some overlap w/ whatever you're upgrading from)
100%, I 'see' why AMD decided to release 5700X3D, etc. The immediate value proposition is fantastic v. AM5.
An AM4 X3D + B550 gets you ~7600X performance at a much lower price point. The 'truncated' upgrade path is undeniable, though...
As example to the diagram my board has support for 4 5.0 M2 drive support. In support of your argument on AM4 my storage was maxed so I needed a AM5 board that supported at least my RAID arrays. Where AM4 boards were a max $500 where I live AM5 max is now $1000. Is that on AMD or the board makers though. I remember when a good board was $200. That was also a time though where a GPU that could beat the best console for $399.Of course the cost is prohibitive of most things in this space. There is nothing wrong with what you have suggested either. I was using my own tangent to apply my opinion and that is not the same as everyone else. The cheapest thing was storage in 2023 but that has been gentrified (again) too.
Imagine you make a $50 AM4 motherboard for an 1600x user and then that customer keeps that board for 8 years thanks to being able to drop a 5800x3d in there. You, the board maker, really screwed yourself out of future sales, you could have had maybe two more $50 board sales in there but instead you only got one.
So now AMD releases AM5 and says we plan to have future compatibility. What do you do as a board maker? You build in the price of all that future compatibility into your first gen boards, cause while you know an Intel user will be back in 2-3 years to buy another $50 board from you, who knows when the hell that AMD user is going to buy another board with all the promised compatibility so you better charge him $100 or $150 now.
That's my take on the pricing situation anyhow.
AM5 loses out on cost because bargain basement 2x8GB DDR4($30) is cheaper than bargain basement 2x8GB DDR5($50), otherwise platform costs are essentially the same.
Nothing AMD can do about people trying to save $20 choosing DDR4 over DDR5 right now.
The cheapest AM5 board is 80$ and I will recommend that you avoid it if you don't want fireworks in your PC case..
If you're buying the absolute cheapest motherboard for a platform, you're probably not buying the most expensive CPU for the platform. A 7800X3D might be able to push the cheapest AM5 motherboard to its limit, the 7600(x) will not. Same rule applies for both AMD platforms, and even more to Intel platforms(Imagine the 14900ks on this$70 board).
AM4 can go with PCIe 3.0, while this goes with PCIe 4.0. The AM5 needs more power phases because the cheapest board on paper supports the Ryzen 9 7950X. A question is with what quality and wouldn't that CPU throttle most of the time...
A tiny part of the DIY market cares. That's about it. But any company just looking to release a product with an AMD CPU just wants to offer maximum product at minimum price. And its not a good show if those AMD CPUs end up in underpowered boards, especially in the higher end on prebuilt systems is it... AMD really makes a strategic mistake here. I also remember a history of meh board VRMs trying to juice hungry CPUs. Its not pretty and AMD should control this shit.Exactly. And then you've paid, as a customer, for a perk you might not even ever use.
I just can't think of a way this better compatibility benefits AMD. Or has, ever. And for myself... I wouldn't care either. Even if CPUs advance fast, at the end of the day you're going to run into another bottleneck, like, say, RAM, because the world's moved to DDR5. I've never really considered upgrading CPUs in the same board. In my mind, board/CPU is a combo that's the basis of a system. If I want a new CPU, I'll buy a recent board to go with it. CPUs last long enough. Can even just sell off the old combo as a combo that can be the core of a new system.
Not that anyone cares, and pretty much no one did that year, the CPU's were OLD tech.