These AMD Ryzen 7500G and 7300G chips don't officially exist but they're making me wonder why we bother with naming schemes
Remember when component naming schemes were simple? Me neither. But I do remember when they at least weren't as seriously baffling as they are these days. Alas, manufacturers seem intent on keeping me on my toes, and these Ryzen Pro 7300G and 7500G spottings are confirmation of this.
A post by QYE on Chinese discussion forum Chiphell shows off an AMD Ryzen 3 Pro 7300G and Ryzen 5 Pro 7500G. If these chips don't seem familiar to you, that's because they shouldn't really exist. All the recent "G" SKUs are in the 8000-series: Ryzen 7 8700G, Ryzen 5 8600G and 8500G, and Ryzen 3 8300G.
As VideoCardz points out, that these 7000G-series chips have shown up ("Pro" business moniker or not) indicates that they're pre-rebranded versions of the 8500G and 8300G—early versions of these chips, prior to AMD rebranding them as the 8000-series. Which does little more than remind me that AMD decided to dedicate the entire desktop 8000-series generation to "G" processors, these being accelerated processing units (APUs) with integrated RDNA 3 graphics, to match its few 8000-series branded mobile processors—which are very similar to the 7000-series.
Oh, except earlier this year AMD also introduced a couple "F" chips into the 8000-series line-up: the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F. Taking after Intel's nomenclature here, the "F" designates disabled graphics, which our Jeremy rightly pointed out at the time basically turns these APUs (the 8700G and 8400G) into… CPUs.
This is from the company that had to hand out a decoder wheel to decipher its own naming conventions, by the way. Oh and they have CPUs and GPUs with very nearly the exact same names right now—you can buy an RX 7700 XT to go with your Ryzen 7 7700X.
When it comes to through-and-through CPUs, though, AMD's post-7000-series chips take the form of the new Ryzen 9000-series. A generation leap, by the way, that will probably correspond to a skip in motherboard generation, too, given that AMD's expected to release 800-series motherboard chipsets for 9000-series CPUs.
At least they've not given up entirely on the naming scheme, though. Unlike Intel, which seems to be abandoning Core 15th Gen naming in favour of Core Ultra 200-series branding. You know, to follow after its Core Ultra 100-series branding… which was for lower-power chips and sat alongside more powerful 14th Gen mobile ones.
Confused yet? I am. If I had them to hand, I'd stick those 7300G and 7500G chips on my wall and use them to meditate on the absurdity of human categorisation, the arbitrariness of nominalism. That's just me, though.