Today, AMD announced new products that will expand its commercial mobile and desktop AI PC portfolio, delivering exceptional productivity and premium AI and connectivity experiences to business users. The new AMD Ryzen PRO 8040 Series are the most advanced x86 processors built for business laptops and mobile workstations. In addition, AMD also announced the AMD Ryzen PRO 8000 Series desktop processor, the first AI enabled desktop processor for business users, engineered to deliver cutting-edge performance with low power consumption.

With AMD Ryzen AI built into select models, AMD is further extending its AI PC leadership. By leveraging the CPU, GPU, and dedicated on-chip neural processing unit (NPU), new Ryzen AI-powered processors provide more dedicated AI processing power than previous generations, with up to 16 dedicated NPU TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) and up to 39 total system TOPS. Commercial PCs equipped with new Ryzen AI-enabled processors will help transform user experience, offering next-gen performance for AI-enabled collaboration, content creation, and data and analytics workloads. With the addition of AMD PRO technologies, IT managers can unlock enterprise-grade manageability features to simplify IT operations and complete PC deployment faster across the organization, built-in security features for chip-to-cloud defense from sophisticated attacks, as well as unprecedented stability, reliability and platform longevity for enterprise software.

AMD has revealed the full specs of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G APUs and it turns out that the Zen 4c cores aren't clocking as high as the Zen 4 cores in the Ryzen 5 8500G and Ryzen 3 8300G. We should point out that the 8300G has a singular Zen 4 core and three Zen 4c Cores here, so there's no confusion. The Zen 4 cores in the 8500G have a base clock of 4.1 GHz, while the 8300G comes in at 4.0 GHz, with both of the APU's Zen 4c cores having a base clock of 3.2 GHz. Oddly enough, AMD lists the overall base clock of the 8500G as 3.5 GHz and the 8300G as 3.4 GHz with a notice that reads "Represents the average effective base frequency of all cores." AMD is in other words averaging the clock speeds of the two different cores to come up with an approximate base clock.

The Zen 4 cores in the 8500G boost up to 5 GHz, with the 8300G boosting to 4.9 GHz, whereas the Zen 4c cores in the 8500G boost up to 3.7 GHz and in the 8300G to 3.6 GHz. Here AMD doesn't provide an estimated frequency equivalent. Despite being budget models in the Ryzen 8000G-series of APUs, both SKUs get two USB4 ports with full 40 Gbps capabilities, plus a pair of USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) ports. Furthermore the Radeon 740M GPU will be clocked at 2.8 GHz in both APUs, but both SKUs are limited to a mere four graphics cores, whereas the Ryzen 5 8600G gets eight at the same clock speed and the Ryzen 7 8700G gets 12 at 2.9 GHz. All four APUs also support DisplayPort 2.1.

At CES, AMD didn't give away too many technical details of its upcoming Ryzen 8000G-series APUs, but details are starting to trickle out and it's not all good news. As has been known for some time, AMD is using two different chips to make the Ryzen 8000G APUs and they're known as the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2, where the Phoenix 2 parts feature Zen 4c cores, which are not present in the Phoenix 1 APUs. This in and of itself shouldn't be a huge issue, although the Zen 4c CPU cores can be slightly slower in some tasks based on testing of AMD's EPYC server parts.

However, PCGamesN noticed that Gigabyte has posted the full specs for the B650E Aorus Elite X AX Ice motherboard and it looks like there's a much bigger difference between the Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2 based APUs. Namely, the Phoenix 2 APUs have fewer PCIe lanes and as such are limited to two PCIe 4.0 lanes for the secondary NVMe slot. As if this wasn't bad enough, the Phoenix 2 APUs only have four PCIe 4.0 lanes for add-in GPUs, whereas the Phoenix 1 APUs have eight. This is very likely to lead to reduced performance if a higher-end GPU is used with such an APU. Note that this will vary depending on the motherboard design, but many B650/B650E boards feature a similar design with regards to the PCIe lanes coming from the CPU socket. Luckily, it's easy to avoid this issue, as the Ryzen 5 8600G and the Ryzen 7 8700G are both Phoenix 1 designs, whereas the Ryzen 5 8500G is the only Phoenix 2 design available in retail, as the Ryzen 3 8300G is an OEM only part.

Courtesy of serial leaker @momomo_us we now have an indication on potential pricing for AMD's upcoming 8000G-series of APUs for the AM5 socket. The Ryzen 8000G-series APUs are expected to use the same CPU cores as AMD's Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, but paired with a new I/O design in a monolithic die. The leaker has provided pricing from what is said to be three different shops and for three different SKUs, with the Ryzen 5 7600 as the reference point in all three cases. All three shops list the Ryzen 5 7600 at a higher price than Amazon, so it's unlikely that we're looking at MSRP pricing here.

The Ryzen 5 8500G has a price range of US$190-240, followed by the Ryzen 5 8600G which comes in at US$240-310 and finally the Ryzen 7 8700G which is listed at US$340-440. The price span is rather large, which makes it impossible to draw any conclusions of what the MSRP will be. Tom's hardware managed to dig up a pair of retailers, including what appears to be the one with the lowest pricing in the leak, which is DirectDial. The other retailer that Tom's Hardware located was Zones, but that pricing doesn't match any of the initial leaks, but are somewhat towards the higher numbers. AMD is expected to announce the new series of APUs at CES early next year.