With the Great Graphics Card Shortage of 2020-21 showing no end in sight, alternatives, where you can find them, are welcome. Whether that’s squeezing more out of your older video card, or settling for the latest integrated graphics, the compromises you’ll make today cut as deep as those mandated by the previous run on cards, during the cryptocurrency mining booms of 2017 and 2018.
Despite comments last week by AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, of some lower-end chip manufacture getting diverted due to demand for higher-power (and presumably higher-margin) silicon, AMD unveiled at Computex today two new APUs—AMD’s own term, for “accelerated processing units”—to provide another CPU choice for PC builders and upgraders hurting for affordable graphics performance. Meet the Ryzen 5000G Series, based on the company’s latest CPU architecture, “Zen 3.”
Zen 3 Comes to APUs
The new pair of Zen 3-based desktop processors employ AMD’s Radeon Vega integrated graphics. That’s atypical for AMD desktop CPUs. All of them, barring the handful of G-Series models, lack integrated graphics processors (IGPs) and require a separate video card for operation. These days, of course, given the price of graphics cards, that can be a deal-breaker.
Enter the new chips. Earlier retail versions of the G Series have been decidedly budget-priced CPUs, with the last two offered by AMD at retail, the Ryzen 3 3200G and the Ryzen 5 3400G, list-priced at $99 and $149, respectively. Here in 2021, with affordable video cards so thin on the ground, it’s practically a feat of magic to find either of these 3000G-series chips anywhere close to MSRP.
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.
They’re also the first new G Series chips to be sold to end users in a while. The Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G debuted in 2019, and while AMD did (and does) produce a series of Ryzen 4000G chips with IGPs, they are offered only in select OEM systems, not to end users except through murky side channels.
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.
Let’s Go to the Spec Sheets
The higher-end of the pair, the $359 Ryzen 7 5700G is, according to AMD’s director of technical marketing, Robert Hallock, intended as a “non”-X version of the high-performance AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (an Editors’ Choice pick for CPUs from our own processor analyst), with the added bonus of the IGP. The chip is a eight-core/16-thread dynamo with a base clock of 3.8GHz and a peak boost of 4.6GHz. The current list price of the 5800X is nontrivially higher, at $449, but retail stock of that CPU has been spotty throughout the year and the street pricing highly volatile.
The step-down new APU is the six-core/12-thread Ryzen 5 5600G, which, at $259 MSRP, is priced more than $100 above the last-gen Ryzen 5 3400G’s MSRP. (That said, we’ve regularly seen the 3400G selling for above $200 here in 2021.) The clocks here are 3.9GHz base and 4.4GHz boost, with the same 16MB of L3 cache as the 5700G.
Vega’s Back for Another Go-Around
AMD’s IGPs on its G Series processors have always been pretty good compared with the HD Graphics and UHD Graphics that have ruled Intel’s desktop chips for ages. Intel has moved many of its latest processors to its newer Iris Xe IGP silicon, while AMD has stuck with venerable Radeon Vega graphics tech here. Hallock maintained, however, that the major advances on the CPU side of the chips, enabled by the Zen 3 architecture, should yield major performance and frame-rate gains in CPU-bound titles, such as many popular online and esports fests.
The Ryzen 7 5700G will employ eight compute units in its Vega-based IGP, running at peak speeds of 2GHz, while the Ryzen 5 5600G will employ seven units at up to 1.9GHz. It’s worth noting that these new-generation APUs have not moved the graphics silicon to RDNA or RDNA 2, the new architectures used by AMD’s latest discrete Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 video cards. When they may, or whether they eventually will, is unclear. So in a sense, the new chips combine new AMD CPU tech with older, proven AMD IGP tech.
AMD did share some numbers for the Ryzen 7 5700G running the game Rogue Company, at 1080p and high settings. The presenter maintained that this demanding game will run at smooth frame rates (78fps in the demo) and even higher with graphical settings tuned low, allowing for enhanced smoothness on high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.
The company also showed some select benchmarks pairing up the Ryzen 7 5700G with Intel’s Core i7-11700. (We recently reviewed the overclockable variant of the latter chip, the Core i7-11700K.)
Both are eight-core/16-thread CPUs, and the AMD-selected tests show a wide range of wins for the Ryzen 7 5700G…
We can expect the two 5000G chips to debut on August 5. More about them when we get samples in to test against the other IGP-equipped players on the market.
When G Goes Pro
AMD also announced a line of Ryzen Pro 5000G and Pro 5000GE CPUs alongside the two new consumer SKUs. These six additional chips are intended for business use and feature enhanced security features under the AMD Pro Technologies umbrella.
All six are designed for moderate power consumption. The Ryzen 7, 5, and 3 Pro 5000G chips are 65-watters meant for compact PCs, while the parallel GE ones are 35-watt and meant for even smaller desktops…
The 5000G and 5000GE lines would seem to be a perfect fit for OEMs deploying them in business PCs that need the multi-threaded power afforded by their generous core counts, plus a little extra graphics muscle without opting for a costly dedicated card.
AMD did not yet state the availability window or expected implementations for the Ryzen Pro CPUs with IGPs. More on them as data comes available, and stay tuned to our Computex news feed for more component and PC news from the 2021 virtual show.
