Friday, June 21st 2024
AMD Cuts Prices of its Ryzen 8000G Desktop APUs—8600G Now at $199
Prices of AMD Ryzen 8000G "Hawk Point" desktop APUs in the Socket AM5 package saw reductions over the week. The Ryzen 7 8700G, the fully unlocked part, is now available for $299, a $30 cut from its launch price of $329. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 8600G has now slipped under the $200-mark, with a $199 price-tag. The chip had originally launched at $229. Both these chips feature a 16 TOPS NPU, and are the first desktop processors that are capable of on-chip AI acceleration. Both processors are based on the 4 nm "Hawk Point" monolithic silicon, and feature "Zen 4" CPU cores. The 8700G packs an 8-core/16-thread CPU with an RDNA 3 iGPU that has 12 compute units (CU); while the 8600G is 6-core/12-thread, with an iGPU that has 8 CU.
Things get interesting with the Ryzen 5 8500G, which is now down to $159 from its launch price of $179. This new price makes the processor competitive with the 13th Gen Core i3 and the lower end of the Core i5 lineup. Unlike the other two 8000G series chips, the 8500G lacks an NPU, and is based on the 4 nm "Phoenix 2" silicon that has two "Zen 4" and four "Zen 4c" CPU cores for a 6-core/12-thread CPU configuration. Both kinds of cores share a 16 MB L3 cache. It has a heavily cut-down RDNA 3 iGPU with just 4 CU. The Ryzen 8000G desktop APU series only features PCIe Gen 4 (no Gen 5), which may not mean much for today's discrete GPUs, but limit your SSD upgrade path to Gen 4 (Gen 5 SSDs will be limited to 7 GB/s).
Source:
VideoCardz
Things get interesting with the Ryzen 5 8500G, which is now down to $159 from its launch price of $179. This new price makes the processor competitive with the 13th Gen Core i3 and the lower end of the Core i5 lineup. Unlike the other two 8000G series chips, the 8500G lacks an NPU, and is based on the 4 nm "Phoenix 2" silicon that has two "Zen 4" and four "Zen 4c" CPU cores for a 6-core/12-thread CPU configuration. Both kinds of cores share a 16 MB L3 cache. It has a heavily cut-down RDNA 3 iGPU with just 4 CU. The Ryzen 8000G desktop APU series only features PCIe Gen 4 (no Gen 5), which may not mean much for today's discrete GPUs, but limit your SSD upgrade path to Gen 4 (Gen 5 SSDs will be limited to 7 GB/s).
25 Comments on AMD Cuts Prices of its Ryzen 8000G Desktop APUs—8600G Now at $199
This makes the 8400G (4 CUs) really good for HEVC/H265 and AV1 transcoding, especially for Plex.
This is my 8700G at the moment (Plex running in the background, active RDP and whatever Windows 11 IoT crap is on):
The total system power is 22W at the moment (read using a TP-Link Kasa EP25). This is on:
ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi
3 x Noctua 120mm fans
2 x 18 TB WD Reds HDDs
2 x SK Hynix 2TB P31 Gold NVMe
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120
X265 is okey at higher bitrates but you kinda end up at a position where intel is better for that if you care about transcoding.
"Oh, also here are our mobile parts shoehorned into a desktop socket, with dramatically lowered cache counts."
They suck as desktop parts and really need to be even cheaper to be appealing to the mass market. They're last-gen performance tier which is a problem because last gen parts are still on sale at a lower price still and have the additional advantage of a cheaper platform. Unless you really can't fit a dGPU in and you need that IGP they're a solution looking for a problem.
Maybe there aren't many of these to sell in the first place, since they're likely laptop part rejects that failed to hit the voltage/efficiency curve needed for laptop parts - so AMD can afford to squeeze the highest price out of them due to low supply?
I have priced a build and the lowest spec MB, RAM and CPU would still be in the range of $550-600 CAD using an AM5 APU. I know we wanted our own to make our own handheld clones with unlocked APUs but these are still $100 too much. If a Steam Deck is $439 where I live the APU alone should be max $199 CAD. I guess AMD do not have enough of these to offer them at better prices for now but every new node TSMC achieves makes the previous node(s) cheaper.
The MBs have not reduced in price. The hope is that when the X870 boards are in store it will put pressure on X670-A620 but the only thing they seem to marketing for those boards is USB4 that is not even a thing for most people. I mean am I going to hook up an external GPU to my PC? That means that we have not seen the drastic cuts in price we usually see in the old stock when the new boards launch. You will not find a good B550 for $50 where I live.
I've read, watched, asked (and been told) that two factors are making new platforms more expensive:
- New PCIe generations require more PCB layers, better shielding, and higher-quality than the prior generation. We saw that with the cost increase from 400-series chipsets to 500-series chipsets, and also with the increasing price hikes for PCIe riser cables, and the increasing number of complaints arising from cheaper PCIe 4.0 riser cables causing problems or not working in 4.0 mode.
- VRMs now need to handle 230W PPTs for stock AM5 support without caveats. It's a significant step up from the 142W of AM4 and even cheaper B650 boards tend to have VRMs and power delivery matching high-end X570 boards from the previous generation.
A620 could come down in price, but they've likely been unpopular, ergo lower volume and therefore fewer economies of scale, due to a lack of any budget AM5 parts until very recently. The cheapest 65W-only A620 boards ought to be on par with the cheapest 65W-only B550 boards since the lane count, PCIe generation, and VRMs needed should be comparable to something like these paltry entry-tier B550 boards:I'm not saying they're good boards, but they do exist en-masse and they are what people throw APUs into.
People almost always bought the 1600, 1600AF, 2600, 3600, and 5600 instead - which were basically the exact same chip for ~25% less money. Sure, on the box it said 65W instead of 105W but that only affects the default power limits. I never found an x600 chip that couldn't hit the same advertised boost clocks as it's x600X counterpart - I suspect some exist but they're probably silicon lottery outliers.
Let's face it, if XT is supposed to be the top bin, then 5950XT should be the only 16-core factory OC model. There shouldn't be two of them, and that leaves no top bin for the 12-core model.
I believe the setup I used was Asrock B450m Pro4 R2.0, Ryzen 2200GE, 16gb RAM (2x8, Kingston HyperX I think, forgot which speed but probably 3200), Intel 330 sata ssd, stock cooler, Be Quiet Pure Power 11 500W Gold, and nothing else connected to the motherboard. Memory was set to 1.2V with lower speeds and the CPU had PBO disabled. This got me 28W measured from the wall. Maybe a more expensive power supply can get this lower, but most platinum rated power supplies don't come in low enough wattage for the efficiency to increase at low loads (highest ~20W efficiency I ever saw was the Corsair SF450 Platinum, and that has been EOL for a while now, the new lineup they introduced just now start at 750W).
I don't remember exactly how much my B550M + 5600G uses with nothing connected, I haven't measured that, the last measurement I did was 32W but that was with 4 fans and a 10GbE card so realistically it should hit as low as ~25W.
However both of those are a far cry from intel systems that can go sub-10W in idle.
The ASRock B650M Pro RS is the board I was eyeballing for a while now, since it had the most m.2 slots for matx. Good to see it doesn't use much power. I'm considering switching into that system hopefully later this year.
Note though that if you have the fans speed controlled then they most likely use less than 2W combined and if the HDDs are in sleep then they also use less than 2W... so 18W for the full system, still pretty good.
ASRock B650M Pro RS WiFi is a good semi-budget (I was able to get it for $120 on a sale) board if you need 3 NVMe slots. However, take note that one of them is PCI-E 4.0 x2 and the only has a 8+2+1 power phase design, which is perfectly fine for a 65W TDP CPU/APU. The HDMI port is also 2.1-compliant as it can do 2160p144.