THE NEWS
Ryzen APUs Go Zen 3
AMD’s chip machine continues to roll
IT’S USUALLY not long between new AMD chips, and this month the Ryzen 5000 series gets some new family members, sporting Zen 3 cores coupled to integrated graphics: Cezanne, replacing the previous Zen 2 Renoir chips. Slightly disappointingly, the graphics side of the equation remains the same, based on Vega. Hoping for an RDNA or even RDNA2 upgrade, as well as a die shrink and a new core architecture was asking a lot in one jump. The GPU speeds are actually slightly slower than the 4000-series APUs, although quite why isn’t clear.
© AMD
There are six new chips, split neatly into two groups, G and GE. The G chips have a TDP of 65W, sort of, using AMD’s magical system for determining such things, which is divorced from actual power draw; it’s more to do with what kind of cooling they’ll need, and to match Intel figures, which are similarly dissociated from actual power consumption. The GE chips have a TDP of 35W. Of each type we have eight, six, and four-core versions, each with double that number of threads. All have PCIe 3.0. These are monolithic designs, unlike most of AMD’s Ryzens built using chiplets.
The top chip is the Ryzen 7 5700G, which carries eight cores and eight Vega CUs, with a base clock of 3.8GHz, and a maximum boost of 4.6GHz. The price the GE chips pay for that lower power consumption is a lower base clock; the Ryzen 7 5700GE dips to 3.2GHz, with the same boost figure. AMD released the usual set of bar graphics, which show its new processors in a favorable light. It pitches the Ryzen 7 5700G against an Intel Core i7-10700, which it beats across the board on content creation and productivity by 30 percent or more. We’ll have to wait for less partisan tests to believe this fully, though. The gaming performance gap looks even wider—if it’s even close to true, these APUs should be speedy enough for some respectable mid-range gaming. AMD says the chips should be good for smooth 1080p action.
Welcome to Zen 3 with integrated graphics, claimed by AMD to be the fastest ever desktop APU. We shall see.