AMD is rumored to be rehashing Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs as the 9000G series.

According to a reliable report on ChipHell, AMD appears to be updating its Ryzen 8000G desktop APUs with the newer Ryzen 9000G series. These chips will be driven by the older “Zen 4” microarchitecture rather than the more recent “Zen 5.” Ryzen 9000G was expected to be built on the 4 nm “Strix Point” monolithic silicon or its upgraded version, “Krackan Point.” One of the chip’s dual-CCX CPU components has four “Zen 5” cores and 16 MB of L3 cache, while the other CCX has eight “Zen 5c” cores and 8 MB of L3 cache. Because they run at slower average clock speeds than “Zen 5,” the “Zen 5c” cores don’t require a lot of last-line cache. In addition, “Strix Point” has a sizable RDNA 3.5 iGPU with 16 compute units and—above all—a potent NPU with 50 AI TOPS that satisfies Microsoft Copilot+ criteria. If the rumor is accurate, this will not be the case for the Ryzen 9000G.

The 9000G series will have a single CCX CPU with eight full-size “Zen 4” cores sharing a 16 MB L3 cache if it is based on the older 4 nm “Hawk Point” silicon. It will also have an iGPU based on RDNA 3 with 12 compute units, but a much slower NPU with only 16 TOPS of throughput, which is insufficient to meet Copilot+ requirements. Minor speed bumps, a 100 MHz rise in iGPU engine clocks, and a 200 MHz increase in CPU clock rates overall are arguably the main differences between the 9000G and 8000G series. The Ryzen AI Max “Strix Halo” chip is being included into prebuilt desktops by PC OEMs, and the non-socketed mobile Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” CPU is still available in a number of MoD (mobile-on-desktop) tiny PCs.