New 8000G series is the “ultimate all-in-one” desktop chip, AMD says

At CES 2023, AMD is making several announcements of new chips. Following Intel’s lead, AMD is boasting about a new series of AI processors.

The Ryzen 8000G series comes in four variants, each based on the Zen 4 architecture. The Ryzen 7000 series, released in 2022, also used Zen 4. In that respect, the chips are familiar territory for AMD. They are relatively efficient compared to Intel’s desktop offerings, as evidenced by the economical 65 watts consumed by even the new Ryzen 7 8700G despite offering competitive benchmark results versus Intel’s latest offerings.

Also an NPU, powerful integrated graphics

As with Intel’s new laptop chips (Meteor Lake), (part of) the new offering includes an NPU (Neural Processing Unit). This means AMD will beat Intel to the punch when it comes to providing an “AI PC” experience on desktops, although we’ll still have to see about the performance figures.

The 8700G is known to use the Radeon 780M-GPU. It means no video card is needed to handle graphics. However, we only know that each 8000G chip includes an iGPU, not what graphics solution specifically is in it outside of the 8700G.

The new processors will be available starting in January. OEM systems will be delivered starting in the second quarter.

This is not AMD’s first time starting a new series with an old architecture. For example, some Ryzen 3000 and 5000 chips were already running on an older architecture than other processors within that series. Thus, paying close attention to which chip contains which architecture remains important, as there are major performance improvements per generation. For example, the Ryzen 5 3300X was between 20 and 30 percent faster compared to the 3400G.

(Still) a new AM4 chip

Since the Ryzen 7000 series, nearly all new AMD chips have launched on AM5, a chipset with support for PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 memory. Meanwhile, however, the company continues to launch new products for AM4.

AM4, launched in 2017, already had an extraordinarily long life. Earlier, the Ryzen 5800X3D, a chip intended for gaming, seemed to signal the end of the platform in 2022. Since then, there has also been the 5600X3D, a variant with six cores instead of eight.

Now the 5700X3D, 5700, 5600GT and 5500GT will follow. Here, AMD uses the Zen 3 architecture. They are low-cost alternatives for users who want to perform a drop-in upgrade for their existing AM4 platform. Since virtually every motherboard with a Ryzen 1000, 2000 and 3000 series supports such an upgrade, this can be an attractive option.