AMD Ryzen 5 8500G: A Surprisingly Fascinating Sub-$200 CPU

The Ryzen 5 8500G across a span of 150+ benchmarks run had a power consumption on average of 38 Watts and a peak of just 69 Watts! The Ryzen 5 8500G consumed the least amount of power of any of the processors tested... The Ryzen 5 5600G even had a peak power consumption of 83 Watts. The Intel Core i3 14100 as Intel's $149 offering had an average power consumption of 51 Watts and a peak of 90 Watts, or 38% higher average than the 8500G and 30% higher peak CPU power consumption recorded. With the Core i5 14500 as the $240 part saw its peak CPU power consumption exceed 214 Watts, yet for AVX-512 multi-threaded workloads especially the 8500G was capable of battling it!

The Ryzen 5 8500G had a power consumption on average 65% that of the Ryzen 5 8600G, showing in part the Zen 4C power benefits besides some clock differences.

When taking the geometric mean of all 150+ benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 8500G was delivering 26% better performance than the Intel Core i3 14100... The Ryzen 5 8500G does retail for $179 to the Core i4 14100 at around $149, but with a 20% pricing premium still is delivering better performance per dollar. The value proposition is even better when looking at the Ryzen 5 8500G nearly matching the Core i5 14500 performance overall for that ~$240 processor. The Ryzen 5 8500G was delivering 12% better performance overall than the 8-core Ryzen 5 5700G processor.

With the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G these new AMD processors were very interesting for their very capable RDNA3 integrated graphics. With the Ryzen 5 8500G the RDNA3 graphics in the Radeon 740M are cut-down so that the graphics performance tended to only be comparable to the Ryzen 5600G/5700G integrated graphics performance. That though still puts the Ryzen 5 8500G integrated graphics ahead of the Rocket Lake Refresh graphics performance from Intel and the RDNA2 integrated graphics found with the Ryzen 7000 series. But what made me really excited with this $179 USD processor was the power efficiency. The Zen 4C cores proved very capable for a variety of workloads. From my benchmarking of Bergamo and Siena on the EPYC side I've already shown that Zen 4C can do great in dense configurations, but it was fascinating to see the power efficiency in the low-end desktop space... With Zen 4C having the same ISA as Zen 4 and very capable, it's a stark difference from the Intel P vs. E core hybrid scheme.

The Ryzen 5 8500G was showing to deliver performance far surpassing Intel's competition for AVX-512 workloads like OpenVINO and other AI workloads and more. With the Ryzen 5 8500G often consuming around ~50 Watts under load, it was deliver excellent performance per Watt too. The Ryzen 5 8500G results for these diverse workloads really makes me want to see an all "C" core desktop processor and/or some similar low-power server/embedded parts. The AMD EPYC 8004 Siena line-up currently bottoms out at 80 Watts. The Ryzen 5 8500G or similar SKU in the 45~65 Watt space is quite interesting for inferencing at the edge and other similar use-cases/workloads as shown by today's very interesting results.

While not needing the RDNA3 graphics, short of new similar SKUs with Zen 4C sans the graphics, given the power efficiency of the Ryzen 5 8500G I'd highly consider using it in a low-power server for edge and other cases or even just a power efficient and budget friendly 1U Ryzen server for CI/CID uses, SOHO database server or development test box, etc where power and budget are very important.

Coming up ahead I have some follow-up benchmarks underway looking more specifically at the Zen 4 vs. Zen 4C per-core power/performance, cTDP lowering to 45 Watts, and other interesting Linux benchmarks. As always if you enjoy my relentless Linux benchmarking consider joining Phoronix Premium.