AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G Review: Zen 4 APUs with RDNA3 Graphics

CPU Benchmark Performance: AI and Inferencing

As technology progresses at a breakneck pace, so too do the demands of modern applications and workloads. With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) becoming increasingly intertwined with our daily computational tasks, it's paramount that our reviews evolve in tandem. Recognizing this, we have AI and inferencing benchmarks in our CPU test suite for 2024. 

Traditionally, CPU benchmarks have focused on various tasks, from arithmetic calculations to multimedia processing. However, with AI algorithms now driving features within some applications, from voice recognition to real-time data analysis, it's crucial to understand how modern processors handle these specific workloads. This is where our newly incorporated benchmarks come into play.

As chip makers such as AMD with Ryzen AI and Intel with their Meteor Lake mobile platform feature AI-driven hardware within the silicon, it seems in 2024, and we're going to see many applications using AI-based technologies coming to market.

We are using DDR5-5200 memory as per the JEDEC specifications on the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G, as well as DDR4-3200 on the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G. The same methodology is also used for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series and Intel's 14th, 13th, and 12th Gen processors. Below are the settings we have used for each platform:

• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 8000G
• DDR4-3200 CL22 - Ryzen 5000G
• DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 14th & 13th Gen
• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen

A major focal point of AMD's Ryzen 8000G series is the inclusion of the Xilinx-based Ryzen AI NPU. While AI benchmarks and those measuring capabilities using large language models (LLMs) are thin off the ground, none of our benchmarks utilize the NPU itself. Much of the Ryzen AI NPU is based and, as such, is focused on enabling software features such as those generative AI capabilities within Microsoft Studio Effects and software such as Adobe and Davinci.

In ONNX Runtime using the utilized INT8 model, we can see that the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G don't offer world-beating AI performance, but we intend to investigate this more deeply.

Using the latest firmware, which removes the STAPM limitations, we can see that the Ryzen 5 8600G shows the most gains, especially in DeepSpeech 0.6, where we saw a 12% bump in performance. The Ryzen 7 8700G also posted some very impressive gains in the UL Procyon Windows AI Inferencing benchmark, with a 34% jump in performance in our charts, but this could be a case where it underperformed in the MobileNet V3 test in the first place.