AMD Ryzen 8000G: Unleashing Full Potential with DDR5-6000 Memory
At CES 2024, AMD unveiled its high-performance Ryzen 8000G series APUs, announcing their availability starting January 31st. These APUs, featuring Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA 3 GPUs, are specially tailored for budget-conscious gamers and mainstream users. Notably, the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G are equipped with an NPU based on the XDNA architecture and support Ryzen AI. This new generation of APUs enables users to effortlessly play casual and even triple-A games using powerful integrated graphics, thus eliminating the need for costly discrete graphics cards and allowing the assembly of more affordable PCs.
However, integrated graphics have a substantial demand for memory bandwidth. According to Donny Woligroski, AMD’s Technical Sales Manager, during an interview with PC Gamer, the Ryzen 8000G APU requires dual-channel DDR5-6000 memory to unlock its full potential. With the required memory bandwidth, the GPU can deliver excellent performance, ensuring games run at impressive frame rates. Currently, the price of a 16GB*2 DDR5-6000 memory kit is quite reasonable, making it a popular choice for DDR5 memory.
The top-tier Ryzen 7 8700G boasts eight Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 architecture CU units in its integrated graphics. Its anticipated market price is expected to be around 2600 yuan, similar to the previous Ryzen 7 5700G. The Ryzen 5 8600G, with six Zen 4 cores and eight RDNA 3 architecture CU units, is predicted to be priced around 1900 yuan, akin to the earlier Ryzen 5 5600G, potentially offering more allure to consumers.
Of course, there’s also the Ryzen 5 8500G, featuring a mix of two Zen 4 cores and four Zen 4c cores in a hybrid architecture. Its integrated graphics scale is significantly smaller, with only four CU units and lacking an NPU. Although it will certainly be more affordable, its graphics capabilities are somewhat limited.
AMD has indicated that due to the higher 65W power consumption of the Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs, the performance of laptop APUs is almost linearly related to power consumption. Therefore, desktop APUs will significantly outperform their mobile counterparts. Furthermore, the PCIe expansion capabilities of mobile processors are not much different from desktop processors, suggesting that future upgrades with discrete graphics cards will not be constrained by performance limitations.
