AMD has reportedly announced a new "F" version of its Ryzen 8000 series desktop APUs with the integrated GPU hacked out. The graphics have not been physically removed, only disabled, but the net result is the same. This is essentially the same as the CPU.

The new chip was spotted by Twitter user HXL at the "Beijing AI PC Innovation Summit" presentation in China, where two new "F" chips, Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F, were listed were listed. However, we assume these are Phoenix APUs with graphics turned off. Based on the Ryzen 7 8700G APU with graphics fully enabled, the 8700F likely has eight CPU cores.

AMD's current product line has no equivalent to the 8400G; the Ryzen 5 8500G has six cores and the Ryzen 3 8300G has four; AMD's existing desktop 8000 series APUs are all clocked around 5 GHz, so these new "F" models will likely will peak at around that frequency.

No information on pricing has been revealed, but these are almost certainly budget chips; the AMD Ryzen 7 currently sells for about $329. A more appropriate comparison, however, is the 8-core Ryzen 7 7700, which currently sells for around $309. [After all, in both cases you get eight AMD Zen 4 cores.

Maybe so, but our review of the 8700G showed that the Phoenix APU isn't quite as good when paired with a discrete GPU, due to lower clock speeds and half the L3 cache (from 32MB to 16MB).

In other words, this new chopped APU would have to be significantly cheaper than the regular Ryzen 7000 desktop alternative to make sense. For a mere $10 or $20, you might as well go with a full-featured Ryzen.

Incidentally, there is no specific guidance on the availability of the new chips at this time. It is possible that they will only be available in China. However, AMD has a track record of rolling out certain products first in China and then making them available on a wider scale; what about the Radeon RX 7900 GRE?

Anyway, the appeal of this new cut-down APU rests primarily on price. If cheap enough, it could be interesting; why AMD would do this is probably because there are a lot of Phoenix APUs with broken GPUs sitting around, and they want to shift them. That way, AMD would be able to sell off the chips at a much lower price.

If they do become available outside of China, we'd recommend being wary of the value proposition; you might be able to get a Zen 4-core for cheap, but the performance won't match the existing Ryzen 7000 models. Basically, don't be fooled into thinking that because it's an 8000 series chip, it's 1000x better.