Sadly this is the product I'm most excited for. Any ideas if they will still work with b450 or will it be a crapshoot depending on the maker?

Only Vega 8? Even that they refined the Vega cores, what's the deal? My 3400 has Vega 11. Would upgrade to better CPU performance, but not for less GPU. I get it, no Navi for APUs yet. But give us the best Vega instead. Am I rambling just for nothing, am I?

Why Vega, why? Do they have so many stock on Vega cores or something?

@anticupidon @Ivrogne DDR4, that's why. Even if they change to Navi (I've seen a road map with them) the performance would be the same. We will only see Navi with DDR5. To summarize: we don't see better APUs because of memory speed.

The 5700G seems a very interesting option, almost like a budget 5800X. Hilbert, are you going to review those two puppies in the near future???

I have a hard time understanding AMD's prices when it comes to APUs. Despite having a lot more transistors per-package than the non-G counterparts, they're hardly more expensive, or in the case of the 8-core, substantially less expensive. The 5800X's MSRP is $100 more and it lacks a GPU. Sure, the clock speeds on the 5800X are higher, but not a lot higher. Just seems a bit ridiculous that if you don't care much about the boost clocks, it's significantly cheaper to buy the product that overall has more, even if you're not going to use the iGPU. The G models have less cache, which to me is a step backwards since the iGPU needs more, not less.

Silva:

Even if they change to Navi (I've seen a road map with them) the performance would be the same.

I'm not so sure that's true, because RDNA(2) might use less memory bandwidth. I'm not 100% sure if that's true, either. In either case, you're not wrong that memory bandwidth is likely the problem. Even if Navi is less crippled by memory bandwidth, it will still be heavily crippled by it, and AMD doesn't want its reputation getting spoiled by DDR4. Better to just start fresh with DDR5.

Blah, only 8 CUs. Why not more, AMD?

@schmidtbag RDNA2 has some memory optimizations but a GPU is a GPU and it will need fast memory or it will bottleneck. Here are some examples: [youtube=bsR3FhJsKl4] No one buying an APU would buy more than 3200MHz memory, as it becomes really expensive after that. That said, performance does keep going up. Considering RDNA2 is much better than Vega, the GPU would starve for bandwidth. There is a reason consoles use GDDR and not plain DDR, the PS5 uses 16GB GDDR6 / 256-bit for 448GB/s bandwidth. DDR4 3200Mhz is what, 25GB/s? For comparison an RX580 memory has 256.0 GB/s bandwidth. Yes, the reason is DDR4 and we'll see more powerful APUs with Navi GPU with DDR5.

anticupidon:

Only Vega 8? Even that they refined the Vega cores, what's the deal? My 3400 has Vega 11. Would upgrade to better CPU performance, but not for less GPU. I get it, no Navi for APUs yet. But give us the best Vega instead. Am I rambling just for nothing, am I?

It looks to be 8 cores at 2000MHz vs 11 cores at 1400MHz, the 600MHz extra clock will make up for the less cores.

TLD LARS:

It looks to be 8 cores at 2000MHz vs 11 cores at 1400MHz, the 600MHz extra clock will make up for the less cores.

Well, it could be. Let's usbsee them benchmarks and see the results. Now, as earlier some of you already said, the higher frequency of GPU cores will be always limited by the RAM frequency. Am I wrong?

anticupidon:

Well, it could be. Let's usbsee them benchmarks and see the results. Now, as earlier some of you already said, the higher frequency of GPU cores will be always limited by the RAM frequency. Am I wrong?

That has been my experience with my 4650G. It has 7CU's at 1900MHz, and it is quite a bit faster than my previous 2400G. Most of that however comes from the fact the Renoir memory controller has no issues driving 3600MHz+ RAM (overclocked DDR4-3000 modules, was the cost/benefit sweet spot at the time of purchase), whereas I couldn't get my old 2400G to push past 2666MHz RAM speed. I can overclock the GPU to 2350MHz fairly easily, but the actual benefit is only around 5-10%. Overclocking the memory however is basically a linear increase (20% more bandwidth = 20% more frames). You can see that in Tiger Lake reviews, it is only when Tiger Lake is paired with LDDR4X4266 does it beat Renoir in some games. At DDR4-3200 it is usually equal or slower. I suspect the 5700G from a iGPU perspective will not perform much better than a 4750G (maybe a little as it has double to L3 cache and therefore slightly less bandwidth demands on the memory bus), however from a CPU perspective it would be a noticeable improvement. AM5/DDR5 will be where we see the next step improvement in iGPU performance, unless AMD produces some APU's with that new 3D stacked L3 cache as a pseudo-infinity cache to take some of the bandwidth pressure of the main memory bus.

Silva:

@schmidtbag RDNA2 has some memory optimizations but a GPU is a GPU and it will need fast memory or it will bottleneck. Here are some examples: [youtube=bsR3FhJsKl4] No one buying an APU would buy more than 3200MHz memory, as it becomes really expensive after that. That said, performance does keep going up. Considering RDNA2 is much better than Vega, the GPU would starve for bandwidth. There is a reason consoles use GDDR and not plain DDR, the PS5 uses 16GB GDDR6 / 256-bit for 448GB/s bandwidth. DDR4 3200Mhz is what, 25GB/s? For comparison an RX580 memory has 256.0 GB/s bandwidth. Yes, the reason is DDR4 and we'll see more powerful APUs with Navi GPU with DDR5.

This. Very well explained: Navi will come with DDR5. Until then, we're stuck with Vega, and seeing the roadmap, next gen will be divided in 2: a Vega version and a Navi version.