AMD's Graphics-less Ryzen 5 7500F To Debut in China Only, Launches This Month

While AMD hasn't yet officially announced any details about the processor, sources close to the matter tell us that AMD will release the Ryzen 5 7500F processor at the end of this month to the China market exclusively, so it won't be available in the US — at least at first. The Ryzen 5 7500F had emerged as a bit of a mystery processor in both unsanctioned benchmarks posted to online databases and specifications posted to motherboard support pages, so we reached out to industry contacts to find out the details. We also learned the chip is built from the standard Ryzen 7000 silicon, so it doesn't use AMD's APU die.

AMD will first bring the chip to China retailers and Etailers, but the chips will also be released to SIs (system integrators), so systems built around the chips will also come to the Chinese market. The Ryzen 5 7500F will drop into standard AM5-socket motherboards, so the systems won't be completely custom affairs like the China-exclusive AMD 4700S Desktop Kit we reviewed. Both Intel and AMD have offered regions-specific chips in the past, so they aren't unprecedented. In fact, AMD released a US-only Ryzen 5 5600X3D just last week. 

We haven't confirmed the clock speeds in the above chart, those come courtesy of MSI's compatibility list, but we are told that the six-core Ryzen 5 7500F is very similar to the Ryzen 5 7600 and will operate with a 65W TDP, and thus have slightly lower boost clock speeds than the 7600.

As suspected, the chip will not have an integrated graphics engine, just like Intel's F-series processors. AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors house a small integrated RDNA 2 GPU engine on the I/O die, so AMD will probably take a bit of a different approach to its F-series strategy than Intel does: Intel has an F-series model for all of its mainstream processors, but that's because the iGPU is integrated into the same single piece of monolithic silicon as the rest of the CPU design.

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In contrast, AMD's iGPU resides on the I/O die, and AMD uses the same I/O Die on all of its Ryzen processors — it just pairs the I/O die with various eight-core chiplets with CPU cores. As such, we theorize that AMD might only use its defective I/O dies on a specialized lower-end chip, such as the 7500F, to minimize the impact on the margins for its premium chips. In other words, we might not see F-series models in the Ryzen 7 and 9 families, highlighting yet another advantage of AMD's chiplet strategy.

Regardless, even if you have even the most basic of GPUs, you won't miss much without this engine present. This unit is small at only 2 CUs, 4 ACE, and 1 HWS. As such, AMD has been quite clear that the Ryzen 7000-series iGPU isn't meant for any type of meaningful gaming. Instead, it's meant to provide basic display-out capabilities for troubleshooting and the like and enough performance for watching videos and doing basic office tasks.

Various benchmarks have surfaced recently, including one that shows the chip purportedly being slightly faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X, but we would take those results with a grain of salt. Given the facts that we've been able to verify, this chip should perform slightly slower than the regular 65W Ryzen 5 7600 (non-X).

According to our sources, AMD hasn't made plans yet to bring the chips to the US market, though it could come in the future, like with the once-China-exclusive Ryzen 5 3500X that became available in the US about seven months after its initial launch. With the chips on the cusp of their China-only launch later this month, we expect far more benchmarks and reviews to surface soon.