AMD Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs combine "Zen 4" CPU cores with a powerful iGPU based on the RDNA 3 architecture, and are the first desktop processors to pack an NPU with 16 TOPS of performance on tap. These Socket AM5 processors based on the "Hawk Point" silicon have been on a downward price trend. Last month, the top Ryzen 7 8700G asked for $299 compared to its $329 launch price; and the 6-core Ryzen 5 8600G went for $199, down from its $229 launch price. This month, the downward pricing trend continues.

According to the latest prices charted on B&H Photo, the Ryzen 7 8700G is now just $269, a $60 cut from its launch price; while the Ryzen 5 8600G faces its biggest ever cut, sending it all the way down to $152, a $77 or a 33% reduction from its launch price. At this price, the 8600G is a formidable processor, with a 6-core/12-thread CPU based on the "Zen 4" architecture (all 6 of which are full-sized "Zen 4" cores); a 16 TOPS NPU, and a Radeon 760M iGPU with 8 compute units (512 stream processors). The Ryzen 5 8500G based on the "Phoenix 2" silicon, with a combination of 2 "Zen 4" and 4 "Zen 4c" cores, is now priced at $139, a $40 cut from its original.

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).

Today, AMD announced new products that will expand its commercial mobile and desktop AI PC portfolio, delivering exceptional productivity and premium AI and connectivity experiences to business users. The new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series are the most advanced x86 processors built for business laptops and mobile workstations. In addition, AMD also announced the AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processor, the first AI enabled desktop processor for business users, engineered to deliver cutting-edge performance with low power consumption.

With AMD Ryzen AI built into select models, AMD is further extending its AI PC leadership. By leveraging the CPU, GPU, and dedicated on-chip neural processing unit (NPU), new Ryzen AI-powered processors provide more dedicated AI processing power than previous generations, with up to 16 dedicated NPU TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) and up to 39 total system TOPS. Commercial PCs equipped with new Ryzen AI-enabled processors will help transform user experience, offering next-gen performance for AI-enabled collaboration, content creation, and data and analytics workloads. With the addition of AMD PRO technologies, IT managers can unlock enterprise-grade manageability features to simplify IT operations and complete PC deployment faster across the organization, built-in security features for chip-to-cloud defense from sophisticated attacks, as well as unprecedented stability, reliability and platform longevity for enterprise software.

Lenovo has unveiled a selection of ThinkCentre desktops powered by AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processors with up to 16 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of integrated NPU capability dedicated to process AI workloads, including the performance focused ThinkCentre M75t Gen 5, the flexible ThinkCentre M75s Gen 5, and the compact ThinkCentre M75q Gen 5. Designed to meet the diverse needs of modern business, the ThinkCentre M75 Gen 5 family of desktops harnesses the AI capability of its component while optimizing its energy efficiency to deliver impressive results.

"The AI PC era is already here and at Lenovo we are embracing it to unlock new possibilities," said Sanjeev Menon, vice president and general manager, Worldwide Desktop Business in Intelligent Devices Group, Lenovo. "The need for businesses to integrate AI into their operations continues to grow and our ThinkCentre M75 family of desktops, with a strong and stable power supply, the ability to upgrade components when needed, and the space to expand memory and optimize thermal management are the ideal options to enhance productivity with AI without heavy investments. Lenovo and AMD have a long-standing partnership focused on delivering value to our customers and we know users will be delighted by the leap in performance of our new desktops."

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.

Last week, AMD's Ryzen 8000GE desktop APU lineup appeared online—four lower power (TDP of 35 W) SKUs are set to join the already released 65 W TDP AM5 "Hawk Point" family. GucksTV has acquired a flagship 8000GE model, albeit in engineering sample form—a Hong Kong-based Ebay Store lists "AMD Ryzen 7 8700GE ES Tray" processors. At the time of writing only one unit remains in stock, priced at $298.99 with the option for free international delivery. The "hugohk" shop appears to specialize in supplying all sorts of Team Red engineering sample CPUs. GucksTV's German language video review pitches the Ryzen 7 8700GE engineering sample against the finalized retail release Ryzen 7 8700 APU.

AMD has not made any official release date announcements regarding the leaked Ryzen 8000GE range, but VideoCardz believes that "expectations are high that these variants will hit the market soon through system integrators." The GucksTV comparison video shows that: "On average, the single-core of 8700GE performance drops by 5%, while multi-core is 17% below 8700G. For graphics, that's a 23% average drop in performance while requiring 52% less power." The reviewer noted that his engineering sample was not allowing access to memory OC profiles, until a motherboard BIOS update was implemented (most likely via Beta firmware)—granting 6400 MT/s instead of the normal JEDEC rate of 5200 MT/s. The test platform utilized an ASRock A620I Lightning WiFi Mini-ITX mainboard—finalized Ryzen 7 8700GE APUs could be ideal candidates for usage in quiet/low temperature compact form factor systems.

AMD Ryzen 7 8700G continues to be the favorite new toy for overclockers and enthusiasts. Der8auer succeeded in de-lidding the chip (removing its IHS), to reveal the monolithic "Hawk Point" silicon underneath. By default, the chip uses soldered TIM, but with the IHS removed and sTIM residue cleaned off, the chip could be prepared for direct die cooling, through liquid metal TIM. This feat enabled load temperatures to drop from 85°C to just over 60°C. This enabled a 5.00 GHz all-core overclock for the chip's 8 "Zen 4" CPU cores.

Also over the last week, SkatterBencher succeeded in getting the iGPU engine clock of the 8700G to 3.30 GHz, which is 50 MHz higher than the slider limit for Precision Boost Overdrive. SkatterBencher's report says that an 8700G can have its power limits raised all the way up to 170 W. The 3.30 GHz iGPU overclock was supported by a core voltage of 1.25 V (which is high considering the tight vCore limits AMD sets for its APUs). The increased power limits and clock speeds result in a 22.31% iGPU performance increase when averaged over 14 tests.

AMD's newly announced Ryzen 8000G "Hawk Point" desktop APUs do not support ECC memory, contrary to what the specifications on the AMD website had initially shown, Reddit users found out. The company has since quietly edited its product pages to remove the bit about ECC support. For the overwhelming majority of desktop client use cases, including enthusiast PCs, ECC memory support is irrelevant. That said, the memory controllers of "Phoenix" in Ryzen PRO 7000 mobile processors for commercial notebooks support ECC memory, and so it stands to reason that upcoming Ryzen PRO models for both commercial desktops and notebooks might feature it.

The AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G are based on the 4 nm "Hawk Point" monolithic silicon, with a more overclocker-friendly set of DDR5 memory controllers than the ones found in the Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" processors. Besides support for several high-frequency DDR5 modes, the memory controller technically supports ECC (at least "Phoenix" does, on the Ryzen PRO 7000 mobile processors). The memory controller also supports a maximum of 256 GB of memory, or 64 GB dual-rank memory modules per slot. It also supports 24 GB and 48 GB DIMM densities.

The first CPU-Z test results of AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 8700G were sniffed out by serial leaker @momomo_us on X/Twitter and the new APU is looking very promising performance wise. It ends up being neck and neck with yours truly own Ryzen 7 7800X3D with a small lead to the CPU over the APU in single-threaded performance, but in the multi-threaded test the APU manages to stay ahead of the CPU, if only just. Both AMD chips are still somewhat behind Intel's Core i7-12700KF, but it has an extra four threads, even though those threads are slower due to them being on the E-cores.

The Ryzen 7 8700G test system was using an ASRock B650 Pro RS motherboard and the APU was paired with 32 GB of DDR5-6400 memory with reasonably tight timings of 32-39-39-102. The tester relied on the integrated Radeon 780M graphics in the APU and the Windows 11 operating system was installed on a 500 GB Seagate BarraCuda 510 SSD. In the single-threaded test the Ryzen 7 8700G scores 675 points vs 683 for the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and in the multi-threaded tests it came in at 7318 vs 7301. Not bad for a 65 W TDP APU vs a 120 W TDP CPU. For comparison, the average for Intel's Core i7-12700KF is 7754 in the mutli-threaded test. Although CPU-Z is far from an exhaustive test, it does at least give us a first glimpse of what to expect from the new Zen 4 APUs from AMD in terms of performance and it looks like it's in line with its best Zen 4 CPUs.

AMD announced its Ryzen 8000G series of Zen 4-based desktop APUs earlier this month, with an official product launch date: January 31. The top models within this range are the "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G processors—Olrak29_ took to social media after spotting pre-release examples popping up on the Geekbench Browser database. It is highly likely that evaluation samples are in the hands of reviewers, and more benchmarked results are expected to be uploaded over the next week and a half. The Ryzen 7 8700G (w/ Radeon 780M Graphics) was benched on an ASUS ROG STRIX B650-A GAMING WIFI board with 32 GB (6398 MT/s) of DDR5 system memory. Leaked figures appeared online last weekend, originating from an Ryzen 5 8600G (w/ Radeon 760M Graphics) paired with an MSI B650 GAMING PLUS WIFI (MS-7E26) motherboard and 32 GB (6400 MT/s) of DDR5 RAM.

The Geekbench 6 results reveal that the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G APUs are slightly less performant than "Raphael" Ryzen 7000 non-X processors—not a massive revelation, given the underlying technological similarities between these AMD product lines. Evaluations could change with the publication of official review data, but the 8000G series is at a natural disadvantage here—lower core clock frequencies and smaller L3 cache designations are the likely culprits. The incoming APUs are also somewhat hobbled with PCIe support only reaching 4.0 standards. VideoCardz, Tom's Hardware and Wccftech have taken the time to compile the leaked Geekbench 6 results into handy comparison charts—very much worth checking out.

At CES, AMD didn't give away too many technical details of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G-series APUs, but details are starting to trickle out and it's not all good news. As has been known for some time, AMD is using two different chips to make the Ryzen 8000G APUs and they're known as the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2, where the Phoenix 2 parts feature Zen 4c cores, which are not present in the Phoenix 1 APUs. This in and of itself shouldn't be a huge issue, although the Zen 4c CPU cores can be slightly slower in some tasks based on testing of AMD's EPYC server parts.

However, PCGamesN noticed that Gigabyte has posted the full specs for the B650E Aorus Elite X AX Ice motherboard and it looks like there's a much bigger difference between the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2 based APUs. Namely, the Phoenix 2 APUs have fewer PCIe lanes and as such are limited to two PCIe 4.0 lanes for the secondary NVMe slot. As if this wasn't bad enough, the Phoenix 2 APUs only have four PCIe 4.0 lanes for add-in GPUs, whereas the Phoenix 1 APUs have eight. This is very likely to lead to reduced performance if a higher-end GPU is used with such an APU. Note that this will vary depending on the motherboard design, but many B650/B650E boards feature a similar design with regards to the PCIe lanes coming from the CPU socket. Luckily, it's easy to avoid this issue, as the Ryzen 5 8600G and the Ryzen 7 8700G are both Phoenix 1 designs, whereas the Ryzen 5 8500G is the only Phoenix 2 design available in retail, as the Ryzen 3 8300G is an OEM only part.

Hot on the heels of yesterday's leak revealing that the Ryzen 5 8600G Socket AM5 desktop APU features a Radeon 760M iGPU with 8 CU, we're getting to know that the top of the line Ryzen 7 8700G comes with the maxed out Radeon 780M. The 8700G is a Socket AM5 APU based on the 4 nm "Hawk Point" or "Phoenix" silicon (unclear at this point).

The Ryzen 7 8700G features an 8-core/16-thread CPU based on the "Zen 4" microarchitecture, with a base frequency of 4.20 GHz, and a maximum boost frequency of 5.10 GHz. Each of the 8 CPU cores features a 1 MB L2 cache, and they share a 16 MB L3 cache. The Radeon 780M iGPU features 12 compute units (CU), amounting to 768 stream processors. The iGPU engine clock boosts up to 2.90 GHz. While all Ryzen 7000 desktop processors come with integrated graphics, AMD does not consider them to be APUs—processors with overpowered iGPUs that can be used for entry-level gaming besides high-resolution entertainment.

Courtesy of serial leaker @momomo_us we now have an indication on potential pricing for AMD's upcoming 8000G-series of APUs for the AM5 socket. The Ryzen 8000G-series APUs are expected to use the same CPU cores as AMD's Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, but paired with a new I/O design in a monolithic die. The leaker has provided pricing from what is said to be three different shops and for three different SKUs, with the Ryzen 5 7600 as the reference point in all three cases. All three shops list the Ryzen 5 7600 at a higher price than Amazon, so it's unlikely that we're looking at MSRP pricing here.

The Ryzen 5 8500G has a price range of US$190-240, followed by the Ryzen 5 8600G which comes in at US$240-310 and finally the Ryzen 7 8700G which is listed at US$340-440. The price span is rather large, which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions of what the MSRP will be. Tom's hardware managed to dig up a pair of retailers, including what appears to be the one with the lowest pricing in the leak, which is DirectDial. The other retailer that Tom's Hardware located was Zones, but that pricing doesn't match any of the initial leaks, but are somewhat towards the higher numbers. AMD is expected to announce the new series of APUs at CES early next year.