AMD Ryzen 5 - 2400G

Finally, next-gen integrated graphics performance arrives inside a CPU worthy of your main desktop system. Jarred Walton is suitably impressed.

- Jarred Walton

After the tour de force of the Ryzen processor rollout over 2017, many had high hopes for the future Ryzen APUs (that’s with integrated graphics) and finally AMD has released its first models. The eternal problem with integrated graphics is trying to combine a good CPU with a decent GPU while keeping price, power, and other aspects in check. This is the best APU AMD has ever released, and it effectively kills off the Ryzen 5 1500X and lower CPUs.

On the CPU side of things, the first batch of Ryzen processors all used the same dual CCX (CPU Complex) design, with Threadripper going so far as to include two of those chips on a single package. The Ryzen CCX consists of four CPU cores, each with 512K of L2 cache, and a shared 8MB L3 cache. On the previous quad-core implementations (Ryzen 3 1200/1300X and Ryzen 5 1400/1500X), each CCX ends up with two disabled cores, and depending on the product, half of the L3 cache may also be disabled. For the Ryzen APUs, there’s only a single CCX, and a maximum of 4MB of L3 cache. That simplifies some aspects of multi-core operation – there are no cross-CCX latencies to worry about – but the reduced L3 cache size may at times be a factor.

In place of the second CCX, AMD has included a nice little graphics solution. The Ryzen 5 2400G calls it Vega 11, which is a Vega core with 11 enabled CUs (Compute Units), each of which includes 64 streaming processors (aka GPU cores). Eleven seems like an odd number, so there might be another CU disabled, but AMD didn’t comment on this.