AMD Ryzen 5 8500G
The Ryzen 5 8500G is the first desktop CPU with AMD’s Zen 4c cores. In some tasks it is as fast as the 8600G, but in others it can be up to a quarter slower. For those for whom CPU performance is less important, the 8500G with its lower price could still be recommended, were it not for the fact that AMD has also made significant cuts in other areas: the IPU is much slower and the PCIe bandwidth is considerable. lower.
Before the release of the Ryzen 8000G processors, AMD provided us with the two flagships of the series: the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G. They impressed with their relatively fast IGPU, but the lower-positioned Ryzen 5 8500G is perhaps even more interesting technically: it is the first desktop processor with AMD’s extra-efficient Zen 4c cores on board.
Identical at first glance, but…
On paper, the Ryzen 5 8500G seems almost identical to the previously tested 8600G. It has six cores, a maximum boost speed of 5.0GHz, equally sized caches and a TDP of 65W. Still, this gives you a nice saving of more than 50 euros. Only when you zoom in further does it become clear that it is secretly a completely different chip: the 137mm² Phoenix 2, which replaces the regular Phoenixdie in the 8600G and 8700G, which is 178mm² in size.
This difference in size is due to several factors. To start with, AMD has omitted the built-in npu, Ryzen AI in marketing speak, from this chip. In addition, the integrated GPU is considerably less powerful with only four instead of eight compute units, and the 8500G has a lower PCI Express bandwidth. Only four PCIe 4.0 lanes are available for a separate video card, and if a motherboard has a second M.2 slot on the CPU lanes, it will switch back to PCIe 4.0 x2. Only the first M.2 slot will then have four lanes. However, the last space saving is the most important: the replacement of four of the six CPU cores with smaller Zen 4c cores.
AMD Ryzen 5 8500G
AMD Ryzen 5 8600G
Cores / threads
6 / 12
6 / 12
Type cores
2x Zen 4 + 4x Zen 4c
6x Zen 4
Max. boostsnelheid
Zen 4: 5,0GHz
Zen 4c: 3,7GHz
5,0GHz
Gpu
Radeon 740M (4 CU’s @ 2,8GHz)
Radeon 760M (8 CU’s @ 2,8GHz)
L2-cache
6MB
6MB
L3-cache
16MB
16MB
Ryzen AI
Nee
Ja
PCIe-lanes
Voor gpu: 4x PCIe 4.0
Total: 14x PCIe 4.0 For GPU: 8x PCIe 4.0
Total: 20x PCIe 4.0 Tdp 65W 65W Die-size 137mm² 178mm² Recommended retail price 201 euros 255 euros Current price € 194,- € 243,14
A Zen 4c core is 35 percent smaller than a regular Zen 4 core: 2.48mm² instead of 3.84mm². Yet, according to AMD, they are very comparable: the calculation speed per clock tick or IPC is identical, they contain the same amount of L2 cache and both support SMT. Still, a Zen 4c core can be significantly slower. That has everything to do with the clock speeds that the cores can achieve. While we can boost the regular Zen 4 cores in the Ryzen 5 8500G to a maximum of 5.0GHz, the clock speed of the Zen 4c cores is limited to 3.7GHz. Now those specifications do not yet tell the full story, we will discuss this in more detail on page 12 of this review, but it does make it clear that the Zen 4c cores can contribute less to the overall performance of the processor than the Zen 4 cores. .
Until now, those Zen 4c cores were only in lower-positioned laptop CPUs, but with the Ryzen 5 8500G we can see for the first time the impact of those smaller cores on a desktop processor.
2024-02-12 05:00:00
#AMD #Ryzen #8500G #desktop #CPU #Zen #cores
