AMD Ryzen 8700G/8600G APUs tests show 30% single-core performance increase over 5000G series

AMD Ryzen 8000G glows in Geekbench benchmarks

The Phoenix silicon for desktop launches next week. 

The new Geekbench entries discovered by Olrak29 indicate that reviewers are already working on Ryzen 8000G tests. At least two of the soon-to-be-released desktop APUs equipped with Zen4 architecture were spotted there, specifically the 8-core Ryzen 7 8700G and 6-core Ryzen 5 8600G.

Worth adding that both of these APUs feature Zen4 ‘classic’ microarchitecture, whereas the third DIY part called Ryzen 5 8500G will include Zen4c (dense) core. This APU was not tested yet, and it is expected that it will have minimal review coverage as AMD will focus its marketing efforts on the 8700G and 8600G SKUs instead.

As revealed by AMD, the Ryzen 7 8700G APU features a 4.2 GHz base clock and up to 5.1 GHz turbo clock, the highest clock of all desktop APUs AMD has ever released for desktops. The Ryzen 5 8600G, on the other hand, has two Zen4 cores fewer, but it will ship with a higher base clock of 4.3 GHz, and the boost clock at 5.0 GHz.

Both APUs were tested with Geekbench 6 software, but it is worth noting that the 8700G is using a newer version (6.2) while the 8600G relies on 6.0 benchmark. The performance is not precisely comparable in this case; however, it is still better than comparing to the 5.0 benchmark, which would be completely inaccurate. Overall, the R7 8700G appears to be 10% faster in single-core test and 25% faster in multi-core compared to the R5 8600G.

Ryzen 7 8700G (blue) & Ryzen 5 8500G (gray), Source: Geekbench

Both APUs were tested on AMD B650 Non-Extreme platform and both were using DDR5-6400 memory. AMD used similar memory specs for its marketing performance evaluations, but the ‘sweet-spot’ is around 6000 MT/s according to the company’s representative.

Ryzen 7 8700G & Ryzen 5 8500G, Source: Geekbench

In comparison to Ryzen 5000G series based on Zen3/Cezanne, one should expect 30%-37% single-core performance boost and 49% to 64% increase in multi-core. It’s a considerable leap for a single generation of product, but then one should remember that 5000G series were not updated for over 2.5 years.

Of course those are just CPU benchmarks, which the most important part of the APU silicon not being featured in Geekbench tests. That part is the graphics subsystem, now based on RDNA3 architecture. While the CPU core was upgraded from Zen3 to Zen4, the ancient Ryzen 5000G Vega graphics will be massively outperformed by third generation RDNA. Hopefully, reviewers will focus on this aspect with their coverage next week.

AMD is launching Ryzen 8000G series on January 31st. The 8700G is set to cost $329, while the 8600G will retail at $229.

Source: Geekbench via @Olrak29_