New leak suggests AMD's Zen 4 APUs are close to release but won't deliver the gaming performance we were hoping for

AMD appears to be close to releasing the new Ryzen 7000G 'Phoenix' series of APUs for AM5 desktops, according to a leaked shipping manifest from X/Twitter user harkaze5719. 

The leak makes mention of several potential upcoming APU releases, the Ryzen 5 7500G (in both regular and Pro configurations) and the 7300G, and all are listed as socket AM5 parts at 65 watts. The leak also makes mention of several laptop APUs in the upcoming 8000U series.

The new 7000G desktop APUs are expected to make use of the latest RDNA 3 architecture in conjunction with Zen 4 CPU cores and include DirectX 12 Ultimate support, which on the surface would suggest that they will provide reasonable performance for 720p/1080p low-setting gaming. 

However, if the current rumours prove true, and AMD ends up using the smaller "Phoenix 2" platform then the APUs are likely to feature a relatively low core/thread count and a maximum of four GPU compute units due to the limited size of the die.

If this turns out to be the case then it's unlikely that these new APUs will bring a meaningful level of performance gains to the table compared to the previous versions, and may end up being something of a disappointment. We'll have to see for ourselves once they're released, but as things stand the performance of these new APUs remains something of a question mark given everything we've heard so far.

For reference, the Phoenix APUs that have formed the basis of the best handheld gaming PCs, from the ROG Ally to the Ayaneo Air 1S, come with eight cores and 16 threads, and 12 RDNA 3 compute units and can genuinely deliver proper gaming performance at 1080p.

Also mentioned in the leak are a number of new laptop APUs under the 8000 series naming scheme. These are likely to be the new "Hawk Point" series which will take over from the current "Phoenix" series, as more of a rebrand than anything like the "Strix Point" chips we're jonesing for. These are listed as the Ryzen 7 8840U, the Ryzen 5 8540U (both regular and "Pro") and the Ryzen 3 8440U, and are all noted as 28W parts. These are expected to utilise a mix of Zen 2, Zen 3+ and Zen 4 architectures and are likely to use either the FP7 or FP7 revision 2 socket already used with the current "Phoenix" series.

We've been waiting a while to see what these new APUs will look like, and if this leak is anything to go by it seems we may be getting quite close to release. A genuinely decent performing APU from AMD could provide a solid platform for budget gaming systems without needing a dedicated GPU, which could potentially push the price of entry for PC gaming down to something approaching console levels. However, as rumours continue to swirl about the potentially limited performance, we'll be interested to see whether the addition of RDNA 3 into the mix can provide a meaningful uplift over the previous models.