Lo dijimos hace unos días, para nosotros el mayor error de AMD son APU, una idea que si bien es excelente sobre el papel y cuya tecnología ha permitido crear chips excelentes como el de las diferentes PlayStation y Xbox, en PC seenten en tierra belongs to nobody. Since they are in no man’s land, they are not appealing for any particular purpose. The results? Having to improvise new versions to release these processors, as is the case here.
AMD laptop and desktop processors
Desktop CPUs usually go on a socket that allows us to install and uninstall them from the motherboard, however the reality is that what Intel and AMD do is solder their CPUs to a small board that we call Interposer and which is in charge of routing the pins from the chip to the socket. This allows for things like porting chips from desktop to laptop, where the midplane is removed from the equation, or vice versa, where the chip is soldered on.
Well, AMD has decided to move its Ryzen microprocessors for laptops, which are different chips than desktop ones, so they can be installed on AM4 compatible motherboards. We’re referring to the Ryzen 4000G and Ryzen 5000G, which were initially targeted at the pre-built PC market before being sold out of the box. They’re really just a way for Lisa Su’s company to get rid of surplus laptop chips. The differences compared to conventional versions? A much more powerful integrated GPU, but reduced processing capacity due to having less cache.
AMD APUs will return to the desktop, this time for socket AM5
Just when we thought AMD’s so-called APUs weren’t coming back for desktops, we came across a rumor that shortly we’ll have three types of processors compatible with the AM5 boards of the Ryzen 7000, one of them is the ones we already find on the market, while the other two would first be the Ryzen 6000G based on the architecture of the same name that appeared last year for laptops and which was based on the Zen 3+ architecture. The ones we would have left would be the current Ryzen 7040 for laptops which would also have their desktop version.
All this assumes the return of AMD APUs for desktop computers, after their long absence, unsurprisingly the last such launch was in 2021. However, this paints the scenario that they fail to place all the chips that they wanted on laptops. After all, those socket AM5 chips weren’t on the company’s roadmap. In other words, as we said before, this is an inventory cleaning exercise.
In any case, it is not a question of seeing everything on the negative side, for those who want to have a MiniPC with everything integrated and without additional expansion capabilities, these chips are the ones that offer the best performance of all. Moreover, we can now assemble our case at low cost and not pay premiums for the complete configuration.
