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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [tomshardware.com]:

AMD's forthcoming Ryzen 8000G [tomshardware.com] APUs may have what it takes to rival the best CPUs [tomshardware.com] for gaming. A Geekbench 5 CPU result for AMD's soon-to-be-released Ryzen 5 8500G has surfaced, and it's much faster than the older Ryzen 5 5600G in single-threaded performance (via @Olrak29_ [twitter.com]). However, multi-threaded performance is only modestly improved over the Ryzen 5 5600G.

The Ryzen 5 8500G is based on AMD's Phoenix silicon and, according to the Geekbench 5 result, has six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 5 GHz. However, the result doesn't clarify whether the Ryzen 5 8500G uses the original Phoenix silicon with plain Zen 4 cores or the Phoenix 2 die [tomshardware.com] with up to two Zen 4 cores and four Zen 4c cores. One rumor claims that the Ryzen 5 8500G uses the hybrid Phoenix 2 chip [tomshardware.com], but Geekbench 5 doesn't illuminate this.

We've grabbed our Ryzen 5 5600G review [tomshardware.com] numbers for comparison, and it's evident that the Ryzen 5 8500G is a significant improvement in single-threaded performance with a lead of roughly 32%. However, there's not a similar boost in multi-threaded performance, which is just 13% better on the Ryzen 5 8500G. Usually, single- and multi-threaded gains go hand in hand, so this result is a bit unexpected. But since it's unreleased hardware, throw a pinch of salt over the results.

This performance would make sense if the Ryzen 5 8500G uses the Phoenix 2 chip. AMD has already confirmed the Phoenix-based Ryzen 5 7640U starts to outstrip the hybrid Ryzen 5 7545U at the 20-watt mark. The Ryzen 5 8500G is probably a 65-watt chip, so the performance gap between the Zen 4 and 4c cores would only widen, perhaps by a considerable margin.

The Ryzen 5 8500G and the rest of the Ryzen 8000G lineup are expected to be announced at CES 2024 [tomshardware.com]. AMD presents on January 8, the very first day of the event. Titled "together we advance_AI," a Ryzen 8000G series would fit thanks to its neural processing unit (NPU). At least some Ryzen 8000G chips might also have the faster NPU found in Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point APUs [tomshardware.com].

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