Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today introduced the Ryzen 7 8700G, a desktop processor that it says features the fastest integrated graphics accelerator on the market.

The chip made its debut at the CES 2024 consumer electronics conference taking place this week in Las Vegas. Alongside the Ryzen 7 8700G, AMD introduced a number of lower-end desktop processors that likewise feature integrated graphics accelerators. In conjunction, the company unveiled a standalone graphics card that includes built-in algorithms for enhancing the visual fidelity of video games.

Expanded APU roster

Alongside its standard central processing units and graphics cards, AMD sells so-called APU chips. Those chips combine a CPU and a GPU in a single, integrated package. An APU’s onboard GPU is generally less advanced than a standalone graphics card, which makes it a popular choice for desktops that must balance performance with cost efficiency.

At CES 2024 today, AMD debuted four new APUs collectively known as the Ryzen 8000G series. The product line is headlined by a chip called Ryzen 7 8700G. It combines an eight-core CPU with what AMD describes as the world’s most powerful integrated graphics accelerator.

The eight-core CPU is based on the chipmaker’s Zen 4 architecture. Compared with AMD’s previous CPU design, Zen 4 features a larger cache and efficiency improvements. The Ryzen 7 8700G’s integrated graphics card, in turn, is based on a GPU architecture called RDNA3 that is optimized for tasks such as rendering lighting and shadow effects in games.

AMD claims a desktop powered by its new APU can outperform some machines with a standalone GPU. In a series of internal benchmark tests, the chipmaker compared the Ryzen 7 8700G’s speed with a computer powered by a 13th Gen Core i5-13400F CPU from Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp.’s GeForce 1650 graphics card. According to AMD, its chip ran some workloads more than twice as fast as the Nvidia-powered desktop.

The Ryzen 7 8700G made its debut today alongside three other APUs that are part of the same Ryzen 8000G series product series. Two ship with a six-core CPU, while the third offers four cores. One of the six-core models and the flagship Ryzen 7 8700G feature a neural processing unit, or NPU, designed to speed up artificial intelligence workloads.

“Last year at CES, we introduced the first dedicated AI engine in an x86 processor for the mobile market,” said Jack Huynh, the senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics group. “This year, we are expanding our AI leadership to desktop computing through our Ryzen 8000G Series processors.”

All four new APUs ship with a pair of built-in overclocking features. The first, Precision Boost Overdrive, enables the chips to temporarily draw more power than the recommended maximum and thereby achieve higher performance. A complementary feature called EXPO will enable users to overclock the memory in their APU-powered desktops.

New RDNA 3 graphics card 

For desktops that require more processing power than an APU’s built-in graphics card can provide, AMD is rolling out the Radeon RX 7600 XT. It’s a standalone GPU that can reach a 10% higher clock frequency than its predecessor and packs twice as much as memory.

The Radeon RX 7600 XT features 32 compute units made using a six-nanometer manufacturing process. According to AMD, they’re based on the same RDNA 3 graphics card design that powers its new Ryzen 7 8700G APU’s integrated GPU. The 32 compute units are supported by 16 gigabytes of memory as well as several accelerators optimized for ray tracing, a popular method of rendering lighting and shadow effects in video games.

Alongside the ray tracing accelerators, the Radeon RX 7600 XT includes software features likewise designed to optimize games. There’s an algorithm called Super Resolution that can automatically increase the visual quality of rendered frames. Another new software capability, Liquid Boost, generates additional frames and incorporate them into a video game to improve the user experience. 

AMD has also added support for DirectML, a Windows feature that allows games to make more efficient use of a desktop’s GPU. It’s an application programming interface that enables programmers to interact with components of a Windows computer’s GPU that are usually inaccessible. Using the expanded GPU access, video game developers can make fine-grained performance optimizations that would be difficult or impossible to implement without DirectML.

New Zen 3 products

At CES 2024 today, AMD also introduced three new desktop processors based on its previous-generation Zen 3 CPU architecture. The lineup is headlined by the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, an eight-core CPU with a 96-megabyte onboard cache. It’s a slightly slower, more affordable version of a processor called the Ryzen 7 5800X3D that AMD debuted last year.

The chip is rolling alongside two new APUs that each combine a Zen 3 CPU with an integrated graphics accelerator. Both feature eight CPU cores and seven GPU compute units. The first APU has a maximum clock rate of 4.4 gigahertz, while the second can reach 4.6 gigahertz. 

Image: AMD