Introduction

AMD Ryzen 5 8500G is the most affordable Socket AM5 processor that’s available in the retail channel, making it the baseline for this platform, and the Zen 4 microarchitecture that it’s based on. A 6-core processor with integrated graphics, the 8500G is intended to cover the widest demographic in the desktop PC market that shops for processors around the $150-mark, which would otherwise end up getting either top Core i3 SKU, or the cheapest Core i5 from the previous generation. PCs powered by the Ryzen 5 8500G are intended mainly for daily-driver productivity workloads, but with higher resolution displays, and a little richer non-gaming content, thanks to its feature-rich integrated graphics. The processor also debuts AMD’s take on heterogeneous multicore (Hybrid).

The AMD Ryzen 5 8500G is technically an APU—a class of desktop processors by AMD that are supposed to feature oversized iGPUs that can take on mainstream gaming at lower resolutions; however, this is a significantly different kind of chip than the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G, which really meet the definition of an APU. The 8500G is based on a physically smaller monolithic silicon that has no more than 6 CPU cores, and an iGPU 1/3rd the size of the one found in the 8700G. AMD codenamed this smaller die Phoenix 2, and built it on the same 4 nm process as Phoenix and Hawk Point, The idea behind Phoenix 2 is that it would be cheaper for AMD to sell a processor based on a 137 mm² monolithic silicon at the $160 price-point, compared to the “Raphael” chiplet-based processor, which entails the 5 nm CCD and a 6 nm cIOD, besides a complex package substrate.

The Ryzen 5 8500G packs a 6-core/12-thread CPU, but there’s more to this. All six cores are based on the Zen 4 microarchitecture, but only two out of the six are full-sized Zen 4 cores, which can sustain the highest boost frequencies, while the other four are physically smaller Zen 4c cores. Zen 4c has identical IPC to Zen 4, as well as an identical instruction set architecture, it even features SMT, but has much lower voltage tolerances, which means both its base- and boost frequencies are lower, which yields a lower energy footprint. The Zen 4 and Zen 4c cores on Phoenix 2 share a unified core complex (CCX), and a 16 MB L3 cache, which means workloads can easily migrate between the two core types, and AMD can use simple preferred-core flagging to get the OS to prioritize work to the larger Zen 4 cores.

The integrated graphics solution on the Ryzen 5 8500G is the Radeon 740M. The Phoenix 2 silicon only features two RDNA 3 workgroup processors (WGPs), or 4 compute units (CU), worth 256 stream processors. This is a third the size of the iGPU powering the Phoenix silicon (6 WGPs), but more advanced than the potato iGPU AMD provides with the Ryzen 7000 “Raphael” processors, which have just 1 WGP, and is based on the older RDNA 2 architecture, which in AMD’s own words, is just enough to “light up the screen and drive 2D productivity.”

The two Zen 4 cores on the Ryzen 5 8500G come with a base frequency of 4.10 GHz, and boost up to 5.00 GHz. The four Zen 4c cores, on the other hand, have a 3.30 GHz base frequency, with a 3.70 GHz boost. Besides the tighter clock speed bands, the Zen 4c cores have an identical IPC, ISA, and L2 cache size to the regular Zen 4 cores, and the six cores share the chip’s 16 MB L3 cache. The Radeon 740M iGPU comes with 4 compute units, and an engine clock of 2.80 GHz.

Unlike the Ryzen 5 8600G and Ryzen 7 8700G, the 8500G lacks an NPU, since the Phoenix 2 silicon physically lacks it. The memory interface is unchanged, with a dual-channel DDR5 memory interface with native support for DDR5-5200; however, the PCIe interface is further crippled. The chip has a total of 14 PCI Express Gen 4 lanes, from which four lanes are committed to the chipset bus, leaving just 10 lanes. Motherboards handle these by wiring out at least one M.2 NVMe slot with Gen 4 x4 wiring, and the PCI-Express x16 slot runs at electrical PCI-Express 4.0 x4, with the remaining 2 lanes being left for other CPU-attached devices.

AMD is pricing the Ryzen 5 8500G at $160 as of this writing, which puts it around $20 less than the Intel Core i5-14400F that lacks an iGPU. The retail package includes a cooling solution.