AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: A Surprisingly Fascinating Sub-$200 CPU

[ET3D]

What struck me is how efficient the 5600G is. I'd be interested in seeing how the new 5500GT and 5600GT perform. I wonder how AMD's tweaks in these new CPUs affect performance and power consumption.

I agree that the 8500G is "interesting", but I feel that outside very specific workloads it's not all that convincing. (Though maybe the STAPM bug is affecting this.)

[pinguinpc]

cTDP results up next... BIOS doesn't allow disabling just the Zen 4 or 4C cores, but will work on offlining some of them as well for a 4 vs. 4C follow-up article.

That is a big meh

[Brane215]

No, it's not. What's coming is for mobile, not desktop.

Minisforum will take care of that

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-bd770i?variant=44423048921333

[GraysonPeddie]

I could see myself upgrading from my server with Ryzen 3 2200G CPU to a Ryzen 5 8500G. The performance increase would be massive, but it will be sitting idle 24/7. However, I'm willing to cut down on the idle power consumption given that I make use of the following:

* IPTables used as a router/firewall running bare-metal along with DHCP server
* Samba 4 Active Directory Domain Controller with a built-in DNS server (bare metal)
* A VM web server running multiple virtual hosts (very minimal traffic especially for development purposes only)
* Media/file server in bare-metal (no Plex, just Zidoo Z9X Pro media player accessing media)

So yeah, I am probably going to go for a rack-mounted configuration with a couple of 2.5Gbit NIC adapters for networking and Internet. I do want my server to be completely silent while idle. And that 8500G looks like a pretty good CPU if I can just go with Zen 4C cores only.

[Brane215]

I could see myself upgrading from my server with Ryzen 3 2200G CPU to a Ryzen 5 8500G. The performance increase would be massive, but it will be sitting idle 24/7. However, I'm willing to cut down on the idle power consumption

Why change the platform for that ?
There are plenty of nice 5xxx options, some even with 3D cache for AM4.
If you need graphic outputs, there are low-power elcheapo options, too.

I bet you can get much more CPU muscle for the same $$$ if you go that route.

[raystriker]

No, it's not. What's coming is for mobile, not desktop.

An APU is an APU. There's literally nothing stopping anyone (except allocation) to use a "mobile" APU in a stationary desktop application. Case and point: Minisforum and the deluge of small pc manufacturers using mobile chips in a multiple flavours of small form factor "desktop".

[Adarion]

cTDP results up next... BIOS doesn't allow disabling just the Zen 4 or 4C cores, but will work on offlining some of them as well for a 4 vs. 4C follow-up article.

Thanks, Michael. The day before I spotted the interesting 8700G/8600G review but thought "Ah, just that peculiar Zen4c/Zen4 thing is missing. I wonder how that thing would come out". Tadaa! Next day it is delivered.
Very interesting and mixed results, this one goes in the right direction for some low power machine, like some Kabini successor. Well, it still runs circles around a Kabini machine. :-)
Looking forward to cTDP results, and if AMD manages to send you an 8300G, I'd be interested, too.

By the way: Does anyone know if these machines are ECC suitable? In the past only "Pro" APUs were capable of it (not the normal APUs, but all CPUs) - but DDR5 has some sort of ECC light by default, right?
I am definitely considering the use of ECC in the future.

[qarium]

These two quotes from the article tell you everything you need to know about AMD's intentions with this processor, namely it has none.
The 8500G is using Zen 4C cores for low power consumption with good AVX-512 performance but at the same time it lacks a hardware AI unit, i,e, an NPU, like the more expensive variants.
This tells me that AMD has no interest in attacking the AI market segment with CPUs any longer and they would be stupid to do so.
Michael has an article on AMD acquisition of Xilinx, this company had excellent technology for video encoding, AI, data center applications, they used to use FPGAs a wide range of workloads at very low power consumption.
With AMD's acquisition, they have started to attack markets that will be very receptive to low power, super fast ad-in cards.
What this means is that AMD has no desire to sell sub $200 APU's that are great for AI or similar workloads when they can sell you ad-in cards that cost thousands of dollars and frankly any of us would do the same thing.
These APU's would be ideal if someone would actually develop a game that makes extensive use of AVX-512 to speed up software based AI or if someone created an NLE with AI powered filters that made extensive use of AVX-512.
In these workloads, this APU would be great.
Perhaps if this is a sign of future products from AMD, such as a 12C/24T APU featuring only Zen 4C cores.
More about Xilinx IP:

https://www.xilinx.com/publications/product-briefs/alveo-u50-product-brief-v2.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2023/04/06/amd-builds-breakthrough-av1-encoder-chip-for-massive-streaming-services/?sh=5bc6ec1511e2

these CPU based NPUs are only made for inference mode with data formats like 4bit fp, 6bit fp and 8bit Minifloat's and 8bit integer INT8 Quantization inference mode.

"they can sell you ad-in cards that cost thousands of dollars"

they plain and simple do not do inference mode in 4/6/8 minifloat or INT8 Quantization on these "ad-in cards that cost thousands of dollars"

instead they do 16/32/64 Floating point and 32/64bit Integer training mode even if it is only pre-training to get a INT8 modell or a 8bit minifloat modell in the end.

if you perform this pre-training with 4/6/8bit then the accurancy of your modell will be very low and you get a bad result.

if you do the pre-training in 16/32/64bit and you only turn it into a final 8bit inference mode modell then the precision is much higher.

by the way this 16/32/64 bit pre-training they do is node made with AVX-512 because all the cpus with AVX-512 are to flow anyway.

instead they do it on a AMD PRO w7900 (because they really need the 48GB vram) or they even use the CDNA3+ instinct A300 with 192GB vram.

[sophisticles]

Geez, man. If you don't know much about a subject, maybe you shouldn't try to pontificate about it.

I'm worried that you may end up with arthritis with all the time you spend "correcting" me.

Maybe we can just come up with a code, a simply one letter symbol that you can post to show that you feel I am incorrect.

How does that sound?

[qarium]

Yes. Socketed 8C16T Ryzen 4C with ⩾ 20U, 32GB~64GB soldered quad channel ECC LPDDR5 >8500, 65watt TDP please.
Very much welcome this kind of APU. I'll set it at 35W TDP for my workstation.

if you only put in 4c cores it will tank the single core performance and gaming performance.
the 3D cache proof that games profit from more cache not less cache.
you need to have 2-4 zen4/zen5 cores to have the singlecore and gaming performance.

all other cores can be 4c or 5c cores.

also quad channel is highly questionable because this would make the SOC very big and power consuming
if you use dual channel ram and DDR5 MRDIMMs 1 7,600 MT/s
then you have the same performance than quad channel but with much less tranistors spend and less power consumtio.