Rumors are growing that AMD is preparing to launch a mid-range APU, with photos of the Ryzen 7 4700G appearing on Videocardz. These "Renoir" APUs are likely to use the 7nm Zen 2 architecture and offer much higher core counts than previous AMD APUs.

In the past, AMD has released APUs at lower price points based on the theory that serious gamers and professionals will use discrete graphics cards. It's a reasonable assumption.

If the rumors are true, and increasingly likely, this would represent an important shift for AMD, along with the recently released mobile "Renoir" parts.

By comparison, Intel has taken a different approach and has had integrated graphics on almost every chip for a decade. There are exceptions (and there always will be exceptions): CPUs with the suffix F do not have integrated graphics (and are a bit cheaper), and the enthusiast-class Extreme Edition processors (such as the Core i9 10980XE) do not have integrated graphics.

Currently, if you want to get AMD's integrated graphics, your options are somewhat limited, a trend that will probably also be seen in the "Renoir" APU: [The rumored new chips are up to 8-core/16-thread CPUs, and even a 6-core/12-thread option. This means a little more choice for system builders.

The new 4000 series Ryzen mobile chips only support PCIe 3.0 speeds, unlike their desktop Ryzen siblings, which have full access to PCIe 4.0 bandwidth. Desktop APUs are also likely to be limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds due to familiarity with the underlying architecture.

It would be unfortunate if true; AMD's previous APUs have had half the number of PCIe lanes of their full-fat CPU brethren, so adding a discrete graphics card won't make them run much faster.

That said, one might wonder what this means for us as gamers. And in most cases, the answer is not really much, except convenience - providing a backup option if the graphics card dies. More important would be to open up AMD CPUs to other areas: NAS boxes, servers, media centers, and other uses where integrated graphics would suffice. It would also be a more attractive option for low-budget PC gaming.

Rumor has it that these new APUs will use the same new and improved Vega architecture as the Ryzen 4000 mobile chips, which is a shame because the Navi APUs look like they could be very interesting. That will still have to wait. We also don't know what the graphics core count will be: the 3400G has 11 Vega cores, the 3200G has 8, and the 4700G is rumored to have 8 Vega cores.

Integrated graphics have come a long way recently and can handle many games at lower settings and resolutions (when they can). Certainly, you are not going to go all out with "Cyberpunk 2077" with integrated graphics, or at least I don't want you to, but it is an option. Options are good things.