Earlier this week, we published a review of AMD’s latest Zen 4-based APUs, the Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G. While we’ve seen much better gaming performance with integrated graphics compared to previous Ryzen 5000G series APUs, including the Ryzen 7 5700G, the team at Gamers Nexus has since highlighted issues with Skin Temperature Aware Power Management (STAPM), short of. This particular issue was investigated by ourselves and we can confirm that the current firmware for AMD Ryzen 8000G APUs (at the time of writing) has a throttling issue.
First, it is important to understand what the Skin Temperature Aware Power Management (STAPM) feature is and what it does. Introduced by AMD in 2014, STAPM is a key feature in its mobile processors. STAPM extends on-chip power management by taking into account the processor’s internal temperature picked up by on-chip thermal diodes and the laptop’s surface temperature (i.e., skin temperature). The main goal of STAPM is to prevent laptops from getting too hot and uncomfortable for the user, allowing the processor to proactively suppress heat generation based on thermal parameters between the chassis and the processor itself.
This is where AMD’s Ryzen 8000G series APUs directly relate. The Ryzen 8000G series APUs are based on AMD’s Phoenix chips, which are already used in its Ryzen Mobile 7040/8040 chips. This means that all of AMD’s initial engineering for the platform is for mobile devices, and then expanded to the Ryzen 8000G desktop platform. In addition to the obvious physical differences, the Ryzen 8000G APUs also feature a higher 65W TDP (88W PPT) to reflect their desktop-centric operation, making these chips the least power-constrained Phoenix releases to date.
The problem is that AMD essentially “forgot” to disable these STAPM features in its firmware, causing the Ryzen 8000G APU’s Zen 4 cores and RDNA3 integrated graphics to throttle after prolonged periods of sustained load. As can be seen from our investigation of the issue, within 3 minutes of playing F1 2023 at 720p high settings we saw a drop in power consumption of approximately 22%, which will undoubtedly affect the performance of the CPU and integrated graphics. performance. .
This directly affects our review data for the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G APUs, as the STAPM issue essentially means that over long periods of time, results may vary. Unfortunately, this issue apparently affects all currently available AM5 motherboards and BIOSes, making it temporarily impossible to run Ryzen 8000G chips without the STAPM restrictions.
We’ve now added a disclaimer to our Ryzen 8000G review pointing out this issue. Once AMD provides a fix, we will go back and retest both chips to collect correct results and better quantify the performance impact of this unnecessary limitation.
In the meantime, we reached out to AMD to officially confirm the issue, and the company responded to us a few minutes ago.
“We noticed that the STAPM limit was incorrectly applied to 8000 series processors. This caused them to lower the PPT limit under sustained load. We are developing a BIOS update to correct this behavior.”
It seems AMD will fix it by updating the AGESA firmware, which should be simple in practice from their perspective. Perhaps the biggest open question is when this fix will arrive, although we can’t imagine AMD spending too long on this issue.
We also have to thank Gamers Nexus for highlighting the STAPM-related issues encountered with Ryzen 8000G APUs and providing more background information. Gamers Nexus’ video review of the AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600 APU can be found above. We will update our dataset in our Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G reviews once a firmware fix is available.