AMD was said to launch new desktop “APUs” (low-power, originally laptop SoCs with relatively powerful integrated GPUs) this year. Recently, these chips have been arriving to desktop platforms with considerable delays. The Ryzen 6000 series didn’t make it to AM5 at all. Reports of Ryzen 9000G raised hopes that current “Strix Point” chips with Zen 5 cores could finally arrive on the AM5 platform. Unfortunately, there’s bad news about that…
Since the existing high-performance Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs (the X and X3D models) are all based on the Zen 5 architecture, it was expected that the APUs for the AM5 socket—supposedly arriving this year under the Ryzen “9000G” label—would also feature Zen 5 CPU cores. This would require them to use either Strix Point or Krackan Point silicon from the Ryzen AI 300 laptop lineup, which include integrated GPUs based on the RDNA 3.5 architecture.
However, a report surfaced on the Chiphell forum—a place that often leaks insider information—suggesting that Ryzen 9000G may be misleading in name. It likely won’t be a new APU with silicon from the Ryzen AI 300 series featuring Zen 5. Instead, AMD is expected to release a mere refresh of the previous generation, meaning these will be APUs based on the 2023 “Phoenix” chip with Zen 4 architecture and RDNA 3 graphics. These APUs are already sold for the AM5 socket under the “8000G” name. What is now poised to launch as “Ryzen 9000G” could therefore just be a rebranding of those older models. We covered them at launch in this article:
At this point, it’s unclear whether the rebranded or refreshed models will bring anything new. AMD might slightly bump up the frequencies compared to the original models—but if so, we’re likely looking at a mere 100–200 MHz, a marginal change at best. According to earlier leaks, GPU clock speeds might reach up to 3100 MHz, though that remains uncertain. These refreshed models could, in theory, also feature different iGPU configurations (it would be nice if AMD granted more compute units to the lower-end six-core SKUs).
To be fair, in terms of integrated graphics alone, the Phoenix APU with 768 shaders (12 CUs) based on RDNA 3.0 isn’t all that much weaker in gaming compared to the Strix Point APU GPU, which has 1024 shaders (16 CUs). The latter is often bottlenecked by memory bandwidth anyway, which causes its additional compute units to often not scale particularly well. That said, RDNA 3.5 architecture introduces various improvements over RDNA 3.0, so it’s unfortunate the new APUs won’t include them.
This wouldn’t be the first time AMD has pulled a similar “refresh” with APUs featuring integrated graphics. In 2019, when the company launched its first Zen 2-based CPUs—the chiplet-based 7nm Ryzen 3000X series (“Matisse”)—it also released Ryzen 3000G “Picasso” APUs in parallel. However, those were essentially refreshed 14nm Ryzen 2000G “Raven Ridge” models from the previous generation, still based on the original Zen architecture. It was—and still is—somewhat confusing situation, and perhaps it’s exactly what is now shaping up between the Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000X CPUs and the Ryzen 9000G APUs, which appear to remain in the Zen 4 generation.
Zen 5 APUs delayed to the next generation?
The Chiphell forum post also claims that Ryzen APUs based on the Zen 5 architecture (and RDNA 3.5 in the graphics core) will only appear after this refresh of the 8000G series. So, it’s still possible that we’ll eventually see a desktop version of Strix Point and/or Krackan Point APUs for the AM5 platform. But the question is when—if they’re part of another generation that won’t launch until next year, it’s going to be a long wait.
Sources: VideoCardz, Chiphell
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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