Over the course of the week, AMD Ryzen 8000G “Hawk Point” desktop APU prices in the Socket AM5 packaging decreased. The completely unlocked Ryzen 7 8700G is now retailing for $299, which is $30 less than its $329 launch price. With a price tag of $199, the Ryzen 5 8600G has suddenly fallen below the $200 threshold. At introduction, the chip was priced at $229. These are the first desktop CPUs with on-chip AI acceleration, and each have a 16 TOPS NPU. Both processors have “Zen 4” CPU cores and are built on the 4 nm “Hawk Point” monolithic silicon. While the 8600G has 6-core/12-thread with an iGPU that has 8 CU, the 8700G has an 8-core/16-thread CPU with an RDNA 3 iGPU that has 12 CU.

With the Ryzen 5 8500G, which was originally priced at $179 but is now at $159, things start to get interesting. With this revised pricing, the CPU can now compete with the 13th generation Core i3 and the entry-level Core i5 series. The 8500G is built on the 4 nm “Phoenix 2” silicon, which contains two “Zen 4” and four “Zen 4c” CPU cores for a 6-core/12-thread CPU arrangement. In contrast to the other two 8000G series devices, this chip does not have an NPU. A 16 MB L3 cache is shared by both types of cores. It has an RDNA 3 iGPU that has been drastically reduced to just 4 CU. While this may not matter much for today’s discrete GPUs, the Ryzen 8000G desktop APU series only supports PCIe Gen 4 (no Gen 5). However, it does limit your SSD upgrade route to Gen 4 (Gen 5 SSDs will be limited to 7 GB/s).