AMD reveals its Ryzen 5000G series of APUs – Coming to the DIY market later this year

AMD has just announced their Ryzen 5000G series of desktop processors, CPUs that merge Zen 3 cores with Radeon graphics to deliver a powerful all-in-one solution for OEMs and pre-built system providers. 

Sadly, AMD has confirmed that the Ryzen 5000G series will not be available for DIY system builders at launch but have confirmed that these processors will be available as full retail models later this year. 

The Ryzen 5000G series have been created using the same Cezanne silicon as the Ryzen 5000 Mobile series, giving them the same core hardware specifications but with higher clock speeds and desktop-grade power targets. With the Ryzen 5000G series, AMD claims performance leadership over Intel’s Core 10th Generation competitors, with AMD ignoring the launch of 11th generation Rocket Lake CPUs. 

Like all prior Ryzen X000G series processors, AMD has delivered Zen-based CPU cores with Radeon Vega graphics. For the Ryzen 5000G series, these graphics chips remain mostly unchanged compared to their 4000G series counterparts. AMD’s Ryzen 5000G series’s main benefits are their addition of Zen 3 cores and larger amounts of L3 cache on each processor. 
  

  

When compared to Intel’s i7-10700 processor, AMD has claimed performance leadership with their Ryzen 7 5700G, ignoring the launch of Intel’s new 11th Generation Rocket Lake processors. Even with the launch of Rocket Lake, AMD sees Intel’s Comet Lake processors as their main competing CPU with OEMs, suggesting that the supply of 11th generation Intel silicon will be limited. 

  

In gaming workloads, AMD also claims performance leadership over Intel, again ignoring the launch of Intel’s 11th Generation processors. Perhaps AMD should have launched these processors before the release of Rocket Lake, as these performance comparisons are outdated. 

PCIe 4.0? 

Sadly, the Ryzen 5000G series lacks support for PCIe 4.0 connectivity, limiting the processor’s PCIe speeds to 3.0 levels. Since these processors are not flagship-level products, PCIe 4.0 connectivity is not a necessity for these products, especially when these CPUs are primarily targetted at OEMs. 

  
With their Ryzen 5600G and 5300G processors, AMD again claims performance leadership over Intel’s 10th generation Core counterparts. Again, AMD has provided no data to compare their processors to Intel’s 11th generation CPU SKUs. 

Why no RDNA iGPU? 

With the Ryzen 5000G series, AMD has continued to utilise their Vega GPU architecture for their integrated graphics solution, refusing to move on to new architectures like RDNA or RDNA 2. We have the same eight Vega CUs as the Ryzen 4000G series, which is a downgrade over the 11 potential CUs present within Ryzen 3000G series APUs. 

With the move to Renoir, AMD optimised their Vega architecture to deliver gamers new efficiency improvements, allowing their Renoir (and now Cezanne) Vega iGPUs to be clocked much higher than their Ryzen 2000G and Ryzen 3000G counterparts. This change counteracts the reduction in GPU CU count. 

With the Ryzen 5000G series, iGPU performance is expected to improve thanks to Cezanne’s use of Zen 3 CPU cores and the processor’s increased L3 cache size. By adding more L3 cache, the Ryzen 5000G series APUs should be less bandwidth constrained, as the CPU’s modified cache structure should allow the CPU-side of the APU to operate using less memory bandwidth. This freed up bandwidth can now be used by the APU’s graphics component. While this is not a straight-up upgrade for Cezanne, we expect the Ryzen 5000G series to outperform its 4000G series counterparts in memory-limited gaming scenarios. 

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