AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux Performance

Today the review embargo lifts on the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G desktop APUs. Announced back during CES, the Ryzen 8000G series pairs Zen 4 CPU cores with RDNA3 graphics and now also boasting Ryzen AI support too. Today's launch article is focusing on the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G Linux performance.

The AMD Ryzen 7 8700G is an 8 core / 16 thread processor that can boost up to 5.1GHz and sports a 24MB cache and Radeon 780M (RDNA3) integrated graphics. The Ryzen 7 8700G has a 65 Watt TDP.

I'm also in the process of testing the AMD Ryzen 5 8600G that should be up on Phoronix later this week. Due to the number of benchmarks run and re-starting all of the 8600G/8700G testing when receiving new firmware, the 8600G tests are still being wrapped up as well as some of the Intel CPU comparison benchmark data points.

Like with the Phoenix mobile SoCs, the Ryzen 8000G series should work out-of-the-box with modern Linux distributions. Given they are still Zen 4 CPU cores in use and existing motherboard/chipset compatibility (with BIOS update), the system platform support isn't much of a problem assuming you are running a modern Linux distribution with a recent kernel release and on the integrated graphics side using a modern Mesa stack.

The one possible caveat to be aware of may be the need to be using linux-firmware.git for having the very latest AMDGPU firmware files. Initially when I started my 8600G/8700G testing I was encountering hangs and AMDGPU errors when engaging various graphics benchmarks. Once being provided with the latest AMDGPU firmware, those problems went away. It's not clear that all systems/motherboards will be needing the very latest firmware but in any event be aware of checking on new linux-firmware.git should you be buying one of these new processors and hit any graphics issues.

Besides the RDNA3 integrated graphics being a big upgrade over the RDNA2 integrated graphics with the Ryzen 7000 series desktop processors, the other exciting aspect is the Ryzen AI NPU similar to what premiered with the Ryzen 7040 series mobile SOCs. The Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G feature an XDNA NPU running at 1.6GHz for helping with AI workloads. In case you missed it, last Thursday AMD published an open-source XDNA Linux driver for Ryzen AI. Though as the code drop happened just days ago, this hasn't been tested yet at Phoronix but is an area to be explored in a follow-up article.