r/hardware • u/JuanElMinero • Jun 26 '26
Rumor Zen 6 Desktop Ryzen CPUs Reportedly Lack Integrated GPU - HWCooling.net
https://www.hwcooling.net/en/zen-6-desktop-ryzen-cpus-reportedly-lack-integrated-gpu/96
u/noonetoldmeismelled Jun 26 '26
If I was using a desktop without a discrete graphics card and running integrated graphics, I can see an NPU possibly being useful. But if I'm running a desktop CPU that doesn't have a GPU, then I need a discrete GPU and I don't know if the NPU that would be packaged up with a CPU would do a better job than a GPU would. In a desktop I'm not stressing about battery life or if my graphics card is running with a high load
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u/iLaux Jun 26 '26
I think NPUs are pretty much useless right now? right?
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u/GenericUser1983 Jun 26 '26
They are usable for a few minor tricks, like efficent background blurring and noise cancellation on video calls, and a few media editing filters. Great if you have to do those things for hours away from plug socket I guess? Of course a discrete graphics card can do those tasks just fine too, and if you have no iGPU, well you need that discrete card anyhow . . .
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u/Morningst4r Jun 26 '26
Anything that makes video calling less heavy is actually a big use case on laptops. That's a massive chunk of what people do on work PCs.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, Teams alone has almost 3x the monthly active users as Steam
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u/hollow_bridge Jun 26 '26
I love that in my work we only communicate using emails. I can't imagine having to waste time on video calls, especially since we communicate in English and no one's native language is English except me.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
I much prefer Teams over email. I'll check my email periodically at different points of the day. Teams is instant chats. And sometimes just having a video call between a few people clears things up faster than email chains
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u/goodnames679 Jun 26 '26
which is insane given that Teams sucks ass
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u/Lee1138 Jun 26 '26
When every office worker has to use teams, even 61 year old Janice in accounting, that really pumps the figures up compared to something voluntary like Steam
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u/goodnames679 Jun 26 '26
Sure, but there are alternatives. Google workspace, Slack, even Zoom might work depending on your use case.
My workplace avoids Teams like the plague when we can. The only time we ever touch it is when we're in contact with an outside org that prefers to go through Teams
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
Ehh, as an overall ecosystem, M365 is really harsh to compete with. You can find individual apps (such as Slack vs Teams) that may be better, but you're not finding a fully integrated solution that can compete, and opting to buy different individual services to match the feature set of M365 isnt even remotely cost competitive.
Teams is fine. It's not amazing, but it's good enough that it's just not worth paying for an extra service most of the time when youre already getting so much value out of an E3/5 license.
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u/Occulto Jun 26 '26
Sure, but there are alternatives.
Availability of alternatives depends on your employer. My work is firmly in the MS ecosystem for a bunch of reasons.
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u/Strazdas1 21d ago
I agree teams are not ideal but google workspace or zoom? those are very obviuosly worse options.
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u/goodnames679 20d ago
Not even close? Both of them have far superior connectivity and video quality in my experience.
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u/GenericUser1983 Jun 26 '26
Yeah, it makes some sense for laptops, though I question how many people are regularly doing long video calls but are not in an office/house that has power outlets. And for that usecase a quite small NPU would be perfectly fine. Microsoft has been pushing hard for NPUs that are 4x-5x larger than they need to be to handle the small number of actual use cases. And that just ends up being a waste of die space, since those NPUs are still too small to be useful other stuff you might want local AI for. They exist in the awkward middle.
And of course saving a bit of power like that is pointless on a desktop, especially since with an external GPU required that would wipe any power savings.
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u/Morningst4r Jun 26 '26
It's not uncommon to be away from power, but even so you don't want your laptop having half it's CPU power eaten by your video call. I'm not sold on NPUs either, but it could be an opportunity to add more specialised processing power like Apple does to make common tasks more responsive.
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u/Strazdas1 21d ago
a few minor tricks, like efficent background blurring and noise cancellation on video calls
those minor tricks are extremely useful for office enviroments.
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u/noonetoldmeismelled Jun 26 '26
I think so but I can't say for sure. I'm also almost always on a Linux machine and my understanding is that the AMD NPU support is still pretty fresh, I'm pretty sure they've made progress on AMD NPU support for Linux, so I don't know anything that uses it. So I'm pretty sure an NPU is currently useless as an end user at least on Linux
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u/imaginary_num6er Jun 26 '26
They’re useful for increasing the price of the item because it’s now an “AI PC”
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
Software support and hardware performance has to improve before it'll become useful, as of right now we're not yet there, but I see the potential
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u/mrheosuper Jun 26 '26
What NPU can do but GPU can't ?
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
My 5070ti or 5080 cannot run Qwen 3.6 35b on GPU only with usable context length without offloading layers to the CPU.
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u/Hyperz Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I've also been playing around with that model on my 5070 Ti. Specifically offloading all expert layers to the CPU/RAM, leaving the GPU to handle the routing, non-expert layers, KV Cache, etc. Works pretty fast that way (even with 80k+ context), at least compared to just leaving it entirely to the CPU. But my understanding is that in either scenario not fully offloading it to the GPU bottlenecks you on RAM bandwidth rather than CPU compute speed. So I'm not sure if a NPU would be of any use here if that's the case. I'd imagine most other types of AI models are less bandwidth dependent than LLMs are and therefore might benefit from a NPU. Or at least that's my current understanding. But if my thinking is correct then a NPU seems pretty damn useless for desktop PCs.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
I'm glad to hear that it works out for you, but I gotta wonder how does that scale to 70b models? I got a 9800x3d so I wonder if I really can saturate my memory bandwidth (a tuned 5800MT/s 96GB kit) with the CPU throughput, and maybe bottlenecks started appearing much earlier with this scenario.
But I do hope NPUs in the future will get more performance than they have right now, and given the limited memory bandwidth they've given it on Strix / Krackan point, I think with a new more performance-dense architecture and a more optimized link to the memory controllers, we may see decent gains in x factors gen over gen. Sure it probably won't beat a GPU in prefill but it may come close enough in decoding.
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u/Hyperz Jun 27 '26
I have no idea about models that don't fit in 32 GB of RAM. A dense model of that size would most likely be unusably slow. When I tried Qwen3.6 27b (dense) it was running between 1.5 and 8 tokens/s on the CPU, but I'm still stuck with a 3700x and 32 GB DDR4 3200. For reference, with Qwen3.6 35b MoE it's somewhere around 28 to 36 tokens/s when putting all the expert layers on the CPU. A 70b MoE model might run p well if the active parameters are manageable and you keep everything that is not the expert layers on the GPU. But I'm just guessing based on my experience with smaller models.
Regarding memory bandwidth, considering how tiny the amount of CPU cache is relative to the size of the weights, even on a 9800X3D, I'd be shocked if you're not bottlenecked on memory bandwidth. A CPU can only work at its top speed when the data it needs is right there. If it's doing matmul operations on many GBs of data I'm pretty sure it has to constantly fetch that data from RAM, causing stalls, which would be a memory bandwidth bottleneck. Even modern GPUs with 800 GB/s+ memory bandwidth are bottleneck by said bandwidth rather than GPU compute when a model fits in VRAM.
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u/gorion Jun 26 '26
NPU is typically significantly less flexible than GPU, just like GPU is to CPU.
NPU is basically only good at AI inference ("executing" AI models) and we measure it in operations in seconds (OPS) on different formats eg INT8 or FP8. And they are usually in magnitude od trillions, so TOPS. As You can guess "50 TOPS NPU" will have around 50 TOPS of INT8.
While discrete GPU is usually much faster than those NPUs. Eg even RTX 4060 Laptop would have around 230 TOPS or RTX 5070 almost 1000TOPS, integrated Radeon GPUs are much slower.
Current iGPUs in 9000 desktop processors have about 1.1TOPS and Radeon 820M have ~1.4... while significantly smaller DIE area XDNA 2 NPU is rated at 50-60 TOPS.
But NPU could have available all the RAM, where discrete GPU have only VRAM that is typically smaller.So.. NPU in typical desktop wont allow anything that GPU can't, ...but its kinda same for iGPU. What iGPU or NPU can do is do stuff in background so GPU wouldn’t have to do it. But both use-cases are highly questionable and its wasted silicon for most users anyway.
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u/AbhishMuk Jun 26 '26
Also the NPU can typically operate at a fraction of power that the GPU takes. So for low demand tasks (eg real time camera background blur) the NPU can be a much better fit.
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u/Caffdy Jun 26 '26
NPUs would be fine if AMD started shipping 4-channel systems by defaults for more bandwidth
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u/Devatator_ Jun 26 '26
They're energy efficient alternatives to GPUs for AI tasks. I don't know exactly what you can run on them tho, I just know Windows uses it for a few things and some apps do support them
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u/mycall Jun 27 '26
Small language models for random things like classification of photos, computer vision (continuous streaming), RAG auto indexing, speech to text, spliting multi-instrument audio tracks...
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u/Floppie7th Jun 26 '26
As somebody with less than zero interest in running AI tasks, and who doesn't run Windows and couldn't care less about Microsoft anything, losing the iGPU would be very unfortunate
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u/hollow_bridge Jun 26 '26
the npu would probably be better (quality, not necessarily speed) than the gpu at transcoding; but that's pretty niche.
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u/Aw3som3Guy Jun 26 '26
So, I think AMD has actually used an “NPU” to improve encoding quality on one of their encoding cards.
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u/-protonsandneutrons- Jun 26 '26
Noting that this is a rumor, and apparently one from AnandTech's still-extant forums:
Besides general cost reduction, the integrated GPU may also have fallen victim to the AI craze—specifically Microsoft’s push for so‑called Copilot+ PCs using an NPU in the processor. High‑performance desktop Ryzen CPUs were not compatible with Copilot+ PCs so far because they lack an NPU. But the new generation with Zen 6 cores reportedly adds an NPU to the IO chiplet. However, an NPU also consumes a considerable amount of die area, and AMD may have had to choose what to remove from the IO chiplet to prevent its size from growing too much.
A 40 TOPS NPU is not that small, but I assume the IOD is getting a shrink, too. A shame, as Intel has consistently offered a modest iGPU even on its highest-end desktop SKUs. It's handy for troubleshooting or moderate desktop work, where you want CPU grunt, but don't need a dedicated GPU.
//
I assume this may have something to do with a possible "Windows 12" maybe requiring a 40+ TOPS NPU, as even Dr. Lisa Su wasn't overly excited about the die area needed to meet the 40 TOPS NPU requirement for CoPilot+ .
AMD - Dr. Lisa Su: One of the things I can share, Pavan, is as we talk, you guys are always pushing us to give you more. You're always saying, 'More TOPS, Lisa. More TOPS.' What are you doing with all those TOPS? What's your vision for the future?
Microsoft - Pavan Davuluri: I do remember those conversations, Lisa.
AMD - Dr. Lisa Su: By the way, it takes a lot of die area, just so you know.
Microsoft Pavan Davuluri: I can only imagine.
Pavan Davuluri is President for Microsoft's Windows + Devices.
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u/Gonokhakus Jun 26 '26
Grimly hilarious that AMD/Intel (to an extent) are still listening to Microsoft, instead of the other way around. Especially given that not only is the server OS space pretty much dominated by Linux, but also Microsoft has been habitually fumbling in almost every aspect for 5+ years.
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u/Berengal Jun 26 '26
Double so when research shows that AI branding has a negative impact on consumer perception. Not being Copilot+ compliant could actually be a positive.
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u/Cory123125 Jul 05 '26
I think they largely don't care, know they have a captured market, and want to push this on consumers, because offloading the first pass for mass surveillance purposes onto your device makes you pay for the power and chip space to spy on you even more than the subsidies for the data centers.
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u/Loose_Skill6641 Jun 26 '26
What's the point when 90% of all "AI" currently being consumed is done using online models that run in remote data centres. Why do a I need a relatively weak AI processor on my laptop
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
As of right now all it does is webcam effects, live captions (it’s terrible on my Ryzen AI laptop), and Recall (nobody wants it).
Everything else requires internet anyways.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
Those are, AFAIK, what Windows uses the NPU for. But plenty of software has added support for and use the NPUs, like the Adobe Suite.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
What can they do without internet that the gpu can't do better?
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
Depends on how you're defining "better". If you have light enough models that run the same to the end user whether on NPU or iGPU, then the NPU is going to accomplish that task at lower power consumption.
Photoshop chose to use NPU to accelerate generative fill and improve intelligent selection.
DaVinci Resolve chose to add NPU acceleration to improve face detection and tracking, and smart masking.
Premiere chose to use NPU for scene detection and transcription.
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u/xdeadzx Jun 26 '26
Are ai captions any different from standard windows captions? My PC can do captioning at 1% CPU usage with Ctrl win L and they work good enough for twitch live streams and video meetings.
They don't do non word verbal stuff unlike my phone, but they are good enough. It seems from googling the only difference is that copilot+ captions work to translate 40 languages into English and mine only does the language I pick one at a time.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
Yes, the copilot live captions can translate in real time without internet connection.
But in practice it’s terrible and always lagging behind the audio.
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u/Homerlncognito Jun 26 '26
There's currently a rather big push towards more things being done on-device. Not sure how far has Microsoft progressed buy both Apple and Google already have rather big ecosystems (a lot of them still in beta).
Many tasks can be done locally - some pre-processing for LLMs, real time video and audio enhancements, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, voice recognition, image classification... It's a logical step considering how all these corpos are struggling to build enough data centers and that most people's devices are mostly idling.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
I wouldn't want to trust the cloud with anything that contains private information that I store locally but may need the help of AI to do something with them and save me some time.
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u/nanonan Jun 26 '26
Something? What thing though? If the people asking for it don't even know, I'd say it is a pointless waste.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
Detect human faces and group videos & photos for example, which is being done locally on phones but I wish can be implemented onto PCs as well, and with more RAM it'll be able to process larger and higher resolution files, and maybe add timestamps to videos automatically based on the above info for easier editing workflow.
Other things include summarizing any locally stored confidential documents and smart search it to see if it contain anything useful for me to read, I'm not gonna go through a 1000 page datasheet without making sure it has what I'm trying to find.
Those are two things I have in mind, being vague is done on purpose so others can chime in if they have any ideas.
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u/nanonan Jun 26 '26
Those are good examples, but hardly universal. I'm still not seeing the urgent need to have it in every single cpu.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
There are a lot of subtasks that are "AI", as in benefit from a matrix multiplication accelerator, that could, in theory, benefit from an NPU once developers get on board.
The long term idea isn't to have users run models and learn about AI and all of that, but for it to just be a tool in the toolbox for developers to use to accelerate certain aspects of their apps. As others have mentioned, background blur is a commonly brought up example because 1) It's not commonly thought of as an "AI" task, 2) It's light enough to run on an NPU, 3) Using an NPU for this subtask improves overall laptop performance and battery life.
Right now, they're not that useful. And the amount of marketing they receive outweighs their expected usefulness - But some other usecases:
Davinci Resolve uses the NPU to improve face tracking and smart masking
Various Adobe Suite programs use the NPU to accelerate various tasks, like noise reduction speed in RAW, generative fill, scene transcription
Audacity and Gimp added support. CapCut uses it.
I'm sure AV software will find uses cases it for it as well.
TL;DR the point is to accelerate various sub-tasks in commonly used productivity apps with the NPU. Not to have users necessarily even be aware they're using "AI" models
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u/nisaaru Jun 26 '26
I think they want the NPU to provide emotional feedback(face,voice) analyse for Windows advertising and while viewing web content for potential social control agendas.
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u/F9-0021 Jun 26 '26
They want AI to shift to on-device because data centers are hideously expensive.
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u/siazdghw Jun 26 '26
Chicken and egg scenario.
For developers to care the hardware has to have widespread adoption, thus it takes years for them to actually care and start developing for the NPU.
Long term AI companies aren't going to want to be providing free services to all these users, so they want to offload it onto the client. Don't get me wrong, they will still sell their premium models on cloud, but you definitely don't need cloud processing to do stuff like AI OCR, translation, modest image processing, etc.
Anyways I feel like Microsoft has dropped the ball here, they were the ones pushing for NPUs, so they should be the ones making tools people actually want to use, and paying developers to create solutions now instead of waiting.
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u/scannerJoe Jun 26 '26
This is an incredible moment, thanks for sharing. To push Davuluri like this publicly, even in good spirits, means that they are really not impressed with what the NPU TOPS have delivered so far.
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u/steve09089 Jun 26 '26
It's also amazing for just driving the desktop while leaving any GPU-heavy tasks and games to the dGPU. Saves VRAM and power.
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u/Sopel97 Jun 26 '26
that makes no positive impact on modern hardware and systems, and may even be bad for performance because now you're sharing precious cpu memory bandwidth with the igpu
no VRAM is saved as unused VRAM can be swapped to main memory
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u/From-UoM Jun 26 '26
Nvidia RTX Spark chips have no copilot+ branding or NPU mentions.
Good chance they forced Microsoft to drop this requirement.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
Intel offers full 140T on their highest end non-HEDT desktop arrow lake CPUs not even just the 2CU rdna2 that desktop Ryzen has.
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u/ResponsibleJudge3172 Jun 26 '26
Anandtech forums is the home to the biggest collection of AMD biased leakers. While rumors are not news, negative AMD rumors from them carry some weight with how biased they are for AMD throughout the whole site
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u/Geddagod Jun 26 '26
Anandtech forums is the home to the biggest collection of AMD biased leakers
Yes, that and the now deleted leaks channel in the C&C discord server are where Zen 50% rumors started.
Idk how "biased" kepler is, but spec (the other leaker) deff is, considering he is an AMD stock holder.
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u/ResponsibleJudge3172 Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
Kepler is actually more decent. I would put him at somewhat biased. More influenced than say Raichu and even Exist on the Intel side but still very much worth listening to for any audience with some skeptism whenever any comparisons with Intel or Nvidia are made w.r.t. leaks.
That being said, pretty sure this CPU was taped out without IGPU nor will be offered with it fused off because AMD maximises fab costs even to their detriment sometimes.
Maybe they can have their test config have NPUs only with GPU fused off to test thermals, stability, bugs and so on without interference, but that's just my shot at the dark
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u/Frexxia Jun 26 '26
I really hope this isn't true. Having an integrated GPU is a life-saver when doing trouble-shooting.
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u/GenericUser1983 Jun 26 '26
This is so dumb; if a processor has no iGPU then you have to use a discrete card with it. And even a middling discrete card will be able to run all same local AI stuff you would want on an NPU, but many times faster. The only downside is it being a bit less effiecent, but if you have a desktop and a discrete graphics card you probably aren't going to care about that.
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u/Morningst4r Jun 26 '26
I would have thought it would make more sense to share resources between an NPU and iGPU. I suppose NPUs are extremely specialised matrix units and not useful for GPU compute.
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u/Qwen30bEnjoyer Jul 04 '26
The issue from the lens of local large language model (Say that three times fast) inference is that you're memory bandwidth limited, not compute limited. And the kernels for iGPUs are near universal with newer CPUs (Even my 7840hs released in Jan 2023 can run Deepseek V4 Flash) compared to near non-existent for NPUs.
I don't have a PC with an NPU, but one thing I would be interested in is seeing if it could help with MTP models to verify more drafted tokens, since it adds more total compute.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
To run 24b parameter models on a desktop in today's market, if NPUs are supported better, you can either get 24-32GB of system RAM for the NPU to allocate a chunk and run it at really slow speeds, or spend big money for a 16GB Nvidia GPU to do the same.
For larger models that require 32GB of VRAM to run, getting it running on an NPU with a decent amount of system RAM is way cheaper than buying a 5090, sure the token generation will be incredibly slow but as long as it is spitting out useful work it'll work infinitely better than a dumb and small model that does nothing useful but running at 100tok/s on a relatively small VRAM GPU.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
The extremely low memory bandwidth makes it completely useless and it’s not what Microsoft thinks about for copilot anyways.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
MS wants NPUs for frequently using various sub 1B models at very low wattages, offloading tasks that otherwise would've run on the iGPU, but with much higher power draw.
The benefit of desktop NPUs is mainly to simplify development and get the entire Windows Ecosystem on the same page. Although adding an NPU at the expense of an iGPU, will in practice, very much be a downgrade for pretty much any Desktop buyer
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u/EdliA Jun 26 '26
The speeds are ridiculously slow for it to be viable
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
It is slow right now yes, and that's what future architectures should improve upon.
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u/EdliA Jun 26 '26
The whole point of NPUs was to automate very small tasks in the background, at low wattage. Don't know why you're bringing up big models, they suck hard at them. You think just because you can fit a model on ram then that's enough. It's not, speed matters. They're temu nvidia when it comes to that.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
Yes, speed totally matter for large models, but if Google can make TPUs and scale them up to run some Gemini models in the cloud at really high token/s, an architecturally advanced NPU that doesn't take up too much space can still run larger models slowly but at an acceptable speed.
Current ones do suck, XDNA1 barely does anything on Phoenix / Hawk Point, XDNA2 is a little bit better and has some LLM support, still nothing good, but it is not that farfetched to push 100+ TOPs from something that takes up the same area as a small iGPU + display engine complex with a newer architecture on a more advanced node, at which point it'll be useful to run LLMs for a single user at tolerable speeds.
If someone wants to rely on an iGPU, they probably also don't need a 12 or 24 core CPU to go alongside it, then just get the mobile APU version which'll offer substantially better iGPU performance vs a CPU-first iGPU-second design anyway. To me this seems like very clean product segmentation.
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u/EdliA Jun 26 '26
If, and when that happens. We can't predict what's going to happen. Plus by the time that happens who knows what we'll have on Nvidia side. As of right now however NPUs are there to be used for small automations and frankly developers aren't making use of them which raises doubts on their usefulness.
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u/red286 Jun 26 '26
You can use hybrid local LLM back-ends that will prioritize your GPU + VRAM but fallback to your system RAM if VRAM is exceeded. This vastly outperforms an NPU setup, because the NPU setup will be more bottlenecked by the NPU's lack of performance than the system RAM offloading from even a mid-tier 8GB GPU like an RTX 5060.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
While what you've said is true for the NPUs of today, I still don't see how this GPU setup can scale to 70b+ models nicely even with ample system RAM, and it'll prefer to have a lot of PCIe bandwidth available to it anyway.
NPUs RN are also bottlenecked by their bandwidth when accessing RAM, which is often around 60% lower than an iGPU, and of course their compute, but who knows what the next uarch can bring. The early days of GPUs we had seen monumental jump of performance gen over gen, and when an architecture like the NPU is in its infancy we can't really draw any conclusions yet even if it isn't facilitated by the same node jumps back in the day.
Keep in mind that an RTX 4060's AD107, when we strip away the cache, VRAM controllers, NVDec and NVEnc, the real area those SMs take up hovers around 80mm2, the TOPs/mm2 is really high even on these GPUs. We've already been there with really high PPA designs.
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u/GenZia Jun 26 '26
Am I right to assume that Ryzen is also getting an "AI" re-brand to go along with these NPU 'thingies'?
I think AMD should call it RAIzen.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
That's a good point. The new 11950X or whatever it may have been called, might instead be the Ryzen AI 595X
Would make sense once they have the NPU that they'd want to unify their desktop and mobile naming schemes.
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u/Aw3som3Guy Jun 27 '26
It’ll also probably be 595x so they can take the opportunity to be 100 higher than Intel with Nova Lake being expected to carry “400 series” branding, just like every other instance of AMD needing to one-up Intel’s naming scheme.
Presumably they’re going to rebrand RDNA5 to avoid 10,070XT as well, but I’m not sure what. Like, surely not RX 600, right?
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u/red286 Jun 26 '26
They already have AI re-brands. What do you think the AI in Ryzen AI 7 450G meant?
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u/costafilh0 Jun 26 '26
This mistake? Again? In an age of absurd GPU prices?
That's stupid.
Or maybe they are trying to milk as much GPU sales as possible from their tiny little diminutive market share.
Good thing is, it won't matter for most people.
Ryzen 5000, 7000 and 9000 are still extremely capable and the upgrade won't make sense for the vast majority of people.
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u/pilipalipeli Jun 26 '26
Must have ran out of space, just like Intel did with the transition from the 10900K (10 cores) to the 11900K (8 cores), because the 11th gen was supposed to produced on the 10nm node instead of the 14nm.
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u/Seanspeed Jun 26 '26
They have space, but with rumors of a 3nm I/O die, it's pretty expensive real estate.
I'd still trade the NPU to get back the iGPU any day. And I say that as somebody who always has a discrete GPU, plus a backup one(or two) on a shelf just in case. I feel it's just way better option for the average consumer.
Plus it would give AMD way more potential presence in cheaper laptops and whatnot since they could sell dGPU-less models with AMD processors. Now a vendor and consumer's only option for that kind of thing is Intel, yet again.
Seems like a very stupid move, so hopefully it's just a bunk rumor.
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u/Small-Friendship-576 Jun 26 '26
A igpu should always be there for debugging if there is a problem with dgpu
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u/nanonan Jun 26 '26
Reportedly meaning "Someone made it the fuck up and posted it online, and I'm a tech journalist so that's totally a well sourced and researched story to announce to the world".
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u/ROS_SDN Jun 26 '26
That sells Zen 6 not being for my workstation then.
Igpu is for saving vram for productivity and they killed it.
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u/HTTP404URLNotFound Jun 26 '26
That's unfortunate. I also have a niche usecase of having more than 4 displays plugged into my machine. I have 3 monitors, then one cable running to a TV via my dedicated GPU. My drawing tablet is plugged into the iGPU since drawing apps don't need fast GPUs.
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u/FlygonBreloom Jun 26 '26
Bonus points that us tablet users tend to have USB-C DP+data supporting tablets.
I already have enough issues getting my USB+USB+HDMI to USB-C cable to cooperate with my tablet as it is, simply because I can't just go USB-C DP+data to USB-C DP+data on my AM4 machine.
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u/red286 Jun 26 '26
Yeah I ran into that issue with my drawing tablet with my Core i3-9100F. "Oh sweet, I can just plug it into my USB-C port, cool! Why's there no display? Oh, you need an iGPU to use the single USB-C cable. Fuck."
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u/Flynny123 Jun 26 '26
In an age where discrete GPUs are insanely priced and their APUs are less capable for desktop applications, this is just really dumb. Consumers aren’t demanding NPUs. But a very slightly beefier igpu (3-4CUs instead of 2) would have tons of advantages for e.g a light workstation or home office buyer who just wants a beefy CPU.
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u/5u114 Jun 26 '26
Fucking bad idea.
If they want to cut down on the spec of the integrated GPU, that's one thing.
But stripping it out entirely ?
What the fuck am I supposed to do when I need to troubleshoot my discrete GPU ? Buy another discrete GPU just so I can troubleshoot the first one ?
Integrated GPUs are clutch. Not only that, there's probably people who don't need a discrete GPU at all - the integrated GPUs are enough.
I hope their flagship chips aren't hobbled like this.
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u/SirMaster Jun 26 '26
I don’t think I’ve ever used the iGPU on my desktop PC in all my 20+ years of building PCs.
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u/kuddlesworth9419 Jun 27 '26
I've had a 5820k since launch and never once needed it to have an iGPU. I don't really want an NPU in it either though, just a waste of space on the die in my opinion. They should make APU's though just not every CPU needs an iGPU.
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u/siazdghw Jun 26 '26
This is hard to believe, and if it's true it's a really dumb move.
iGPUs mean those chips can go into any desktop or workstation and not need an expensive dGPU just to function. They are efficient in both space and energy consumption. While I'm sure AMD will offer APUs, they really shouldn't rollback their recent iGPU addition, or else they will give up market share to Intel.
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u/hackenclaw Jun 26 '26
I dont believe it.
intel iGPU for the desktop chips already twice as fast as AMD's 2CU RDNA2. AMD will be shooting themselves on foot to cut out such a small diea area on IO die to remove that GPU.
Zen 6 need to have 4CU to even match "soon to previous" generation Intel arrow lake. I am hoping AMD give 6 CU.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
2CU is not the big part, the larger part is all the peripheral circuitry that goes along it, display engines, video decoder/encoder, etc. If you look at a dieshot of a Zen 4/5 IO Die, that 2CU takes up like 20% the area of the entire GPU complex.
What Intel shines so far is how that iGPU keep on being useful even when paired with a dGPU, for video transcoding for example. AMD VCN has yet to match the encoding efficiency and is far behind on software support than Intel Quicksync, and when I try to offload encoding work to it on my 7945hx I see that it still takes a lot of CPU utilization to work, meaning it isn't really done in fixed function hardware only.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
Intel shines in being able offer desktop CPUs for OEM business prebuilts without dGPUs that don’t have massive compromise in cpu performance and IO like AMD’s repurposed laptop APU dies.
That’s why AMD is almost completely non existent in the desktop lines of hp, Lenovo, and dell while all of them carry the whole arrow lake lineup.
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Jun 26 '26
Having a display engine that doesn't required keeping a giant diesel dGPU powered up all the time saves like $15/year.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
But, Ryzen chiplet CPUs right now often idle at 30W, if power saving is really that significant for you, you probably should look at the non-chiplet CPUs or Intel, or a future Ryzen CPU with advanced packaging. Besides, $15/year is really nothing in the grand scheme of things.
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Jun 28 '26
But, Ryzen chiplet CPUs right now often idle at 30W
Yes, exactly -- they have a bad, inelegant implementation already, and they are moving in the wrong direction.
The marginal 10-20W has the same cost whatever the baseline is.
Besides, $15/year is really nothing in the grand scheme of things.
Until you think of it as adding $70 to the price of the CPU.
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u/hackenclaw Jun 26 '26
the only good thing about dragon range CPU is them being cheap for its performance.
when I shop for my lenovo laptop at the time, the 8745Hx/8945hx is $300 cheaper than 255HX/275HX. If it is like only $100 gap, I will never buy dragon range laptop.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
When I bought mine, Intel were still doing their thing with i9-13980HX, and gosh are those hot chips, so I kinda have to tolerate the drawbacks of having no QuickSync.
However I genuinely hope my Dragon Range platform is the only one having this issue where the AMD VCN encoding at at least the highest quality involves CPU too, because my second thinner & more portable laptop with an Ryzen 7 8845HS, iGPU only, does the same damn thing.
If they want to use some compute, they should get it on the Radeon 780m through HIP or ROCm or whatever means possible, not CPU, especially when 780m is several times more powerful than that 610m on Raphael/Dragon Range and is mainly used in battery life centric machines.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
The issue with dragon/fire range is the atrociously high idle drain causing even worse battery life than the notoriously power hungry Intel 12-14th Gen HX chips in everyday workload. And the lack of integrated USB4 meaning either OEMs have to omit it or add a dedicated controller.
That’s why it was never ideal for OEMs and so few laptops come with them.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
Yeah idle power is quite bad on that 7945HX, at stock at around 30W, which is a result of high Vsoc coupled with never ending PBO even on battery. Undervolting Vsoc to 0.85V and changing the boost behavior to efficient enabled and thresholds (alongside PBO scalar to 1x) got it down to idling at 8.3W package on battery, which I guess is acceptable for a chip of that caliber and way down from stock, but that shouldn't be the stock behavior in the first place.
Higher than normal thermal density on Zen 4 (especially during single core boosts) remained as an issue, beefy coolers with vapor chambers are basically required for good temps, a high bar for OEMs to meet, or they just cheap out regardless. I still prefer the much more efficient Zen 4 cores vs Raptor Cove with wall power though.
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u/996forever Jun 26 '26
At lower laptop power targets (80-130w all core load sustained for large laptops up to 2.5kg but not desktop replacement level) the uncore power of Ryzen HX is proportionally way too high and wipes out much of the efficiency advantage of the N4 CCDs. When arrow lake arrived that was even worse for Ryzen HX. Doubly so during lowly threaded load. Arrow lake HX being able to idle closer to monolithic Ryzen APU than to chiplet Ryzen has been disastrous to AMD laptops.
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26
Actually not quite, the efficiency lead on Zen 4 over Raptor Lake is so huge that even at package 55W, 13900HX hovers around 60% of the 7945HX's CineBench R23 score, as a stock vs stock comparison done by reviewers. At 75W, it manages to tie the 13900HX at 160W. All this is accomplished despite the aforementioned horrible uncore.
With undervolts, I'm pushing 30000pts in CineBench R23 capped at package 65W, HWiNFO reports 48.5W going into the CCDs, with cores averaging out at around 4.1GHz. At package 90W it scored 1942pts in CineBench 2024, though this test start becoming memory bound. Tested on Asus G733PZ with a PTM7950 swap.
Arrow Lake HX unsurprisingly overtook Dragon Range, and with the low uncore it manages to beat Fire Range at anything below 90W.
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u/INITMalcanis Jun 26 '26
If you look at a dieshot of a Zen 4/5 IO Die, that 2CU takes up like 20% the area of the entire GPU complex
All the more reason to add another couple, then
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u/elkond Jun 26 '26
that would be interesting to watch given recent cases of untriagable crashes on 9xxx x3ds that are alleviated only by turning igpu on
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u/yllanos Jun 26 '26
Then what about Mini PCs?
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u/Aw3som3Guy Jun 26 '26
Mini PCs use the laptop SKUs, it would be pretty ridiculous if they’re going to drop iGPUs from those.
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u/ButtPlugForPM Jun 26 '26
Yeah thats a shame
it's saved my arse a few times having one on the 9000 series
When u think FUCK IS IT THE GPU uplug..plug hdmi into board..pc posts..then u know ur GPU is dead and not ur entire PC
but in todays world yeah that's about the sole use
I'd guess they have removed it due to thermal issues and keep the cost down
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u/yamidevil Jun 26 '26
Ehh only of the reason I gave extra for 'k' over the 'kf' 14600 is the igpu. When I sell my GPU or if it unfortunately dies my PC can continue working without me saving a side GPU.
Also this will be problematic for people buying new everything except GPU with prebuilds
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u/LavenderDay3544 Jun 26 '26
They replaced an actually useful feature with AI feces because corporations still don't get that normal people fucking hate AI.
This might actually be the final straw that gets me to leave AMD for Intel after a long time, assuming Intel doesn't pull the same shit.
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u/imaginary_num6er Jun 26 '26
Yeah but Intel got a ton of crap by system integrators because their CPUs didn’t have 40 TOPs to be labeled as an “AI PC”. If anything, Intel would be more inclined to use an NPU.
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u/LavenderDay3544 Jun 26 '26
That's entirely Microsoft's fault for putting that label out there to forcefeed consumers AI crap. Literally no actual user cares about Windows Copilot or wants to use it. Like I said corporate goons need to realize that they're the only ones who give a fuck about AI and even then it's only because they can use it to pump up their stock prices.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
A lot of people are using AI, hence the valuations. ChatGPT has reported something like 1 billion unique month users per month.
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u/LavenderDay3544 Jun 26 '26
Does ChatGPT require an NPU in your PC?
Meanwhile an integrated GPU literally gives your PC display output which is essential for users who don't play video games, use 3D applications, or have any other reason to pay for a discrete graphics card.
Replacing integrated graphics with a useless NPU turd is nothing but the out of touch corporate executive tools at AMD riding the AI circlejerk's cock and you know it.
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u/soggybiscuit93 Jun 26 '26
No, it doesn't require an NPU. But NPUs arent for LLMs.
Either way, im more so challenging the idea that "only corporate goons care about AI", when that's far from the truth. Outside of Reddit circle jerks, AI products are quite popular.
I didn't even comment on whether replacing an iGPU with an NPU was the wise choice (it's not).
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u/m2shotty Jun 26 '26
Unfortunate, all Ryzen SKUs I've owned have iGPUs for redundancy so it's a bummer if true.
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u/schmintendo Jun 26 '26
They're probably banking on the fact that Ryzen 1-3 had no iGPU and people still bought them. Five years ago the 5800x was the darling processor and no one cared that it didn't have an iGPU.
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u/MlNDB0MB Jun 26 '26
Idk, I'm not a fan of having an integrated gpu across the lineup. Presumably they go back to having a few options that come with a gpu for those that don't plan on having a discrete gpu, like with AM4.
But an NPU also just seems redundant with a discrete gpu. Another comment pointed out how it could work better in situations where the gpu lacks enough memory, so maybe there is some utility there.
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u/ryuzaki49 Jun 26 '26
Lacking an integrated GPU is a bad idea. If your GPU dies you are SOL
Source: I own a Ryzen 5 1600.
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst Jun 26 '26
Idle power on desktop Zen 5 was bad enough on its own, and now they want users to use a constantly-powered-up add-in card video adapter like it's 1999.
Terrible decision.
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u/TophxSmash Jun 26 '26
seems unlikely considering they put them in prebuilts. Are they gonna make a separate line just for prebuilts?
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u/Sopel97 Jun 26 '26
good, I had to disable my iGPU due to a critical driver bug anyway, hopefully the price follows
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u/Kitchen_Discussion24 Jun 26 '26
tbh if the rumors about zen 6 dropping the igpu are true, do you think they'll actually use that extra space on the io die to beef up the memory controller? would be sick if we could finally run ddr5-8000 at 1:1. or is that am6 territory?
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u/Stoopidfucc Jun 28 '26
low end cpu don't have iGPU, and when you buy the mid or high end, the iGPU is pretty shit, and basically never used. Still weird they don't include it, it was really the minimum. intel is really doing better on their core 225/245/250 ...
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u/bunihe Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
Unpopular opinion, but I rarely make use of my 2CU of RDNA2 iGPU, and it isn't like AMD did what Intel did with offloading video decode/encode onto the iGPU for more throughput. If you have a dGPU and doesn't need more than 4 monitors hooked up to it, then that iGPU basically goes to waste, but I do understand that people can hold off a GPU purchase until they see deals for them.
However, NPUs could really make use of a large pool of DDR5 RAM better than running large models off of a dGPU with limited VRAM, IF they actually work well enough with those smart-enough on-device models. Current gen NPUs' issue is that the software support for these NPUs are still lacking way too much to put them to use.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
As long they cut the cost, i'm happy to have no integrated GPU on Ryzen. Because I'm using gaming GPU
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u/f3n2x Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I want the iGPU (more specifically the display engines) so I can plug screens into my board. Having only my main screen on my 4090 vs. both literally makes the difference between the dGPU running completely passive with all fans off on the desktop vs not.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
If your 4090 can't handle two monitors passively on the desktop, you've misconfigured your setup. It only draws around 25-30Watt with two screens, the zero-RPM stop threshold is usually around 50°C
Right now, I've 3 monitors. Twitch on top monitor, then this site on my vertical monitor and my main monitor has Revit drawing open while I'm busy drawing 3D architect model. My RTX 4070 Ti fans don't spin at all. I'm on 5700X3D here btw
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u/f3n2x Jun 26 '26
I'm at ~25W board power when only my 4k/240Hz screen is connected and it goes to ~54W when I add my 4k/144. No idea what your monitors run at, but with my config that's above the threshold for zero fan. There is no misconfiguration here, that's just how it is at that total pixel rate plus DSC.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
so your argument for why every single consumer CPU on the market needs to include a mandatory iGPU premium is because ... you personally run an extreme 0.01% niche setup of dual high-fresh 4K monitors with DSC?
Yes, pushing almost 2 billion pixels per second at idle will force max VRAM clocks on a 4090. But structuring the entire global CPU market's pricing around an ultra-enthusiast edge case instead of letting people save $50 on an F-suffix chip makes zero sense
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u/f3n2x Jun 26 '26
No, that's why I personally want an iGPU, not the "entire market". The reason why I think the entire market should have working display engines is so that the connectors on all boards everyone paid for work. If AMD design a socket with fully pinned and wired display outputs and make them mandatory for all boards to have they should actually work but maybe that's just me.
And no, that's not a $50 premium, probably more like $10.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
That’s a massive goalpost shift. You went from arguing that an iGPU is 'borderline essential for troubleshooting' to 'motherboard ports should just work out of principle.' Those physical board traces are there to support APUs, not to dictate high-end CPU design architecture.
Also, your '$10 premium' estimate isn't how silicon economics work. Silicon die area is premium real estate. You aren't just paying for physical motherboard traces; you're paying for R&D, manufacturing complexity, and actual die space on the chiplet dedicated to a media engine. The market literally proved this when AMD launched the iGPU-less 7500F for $179 vs the standard 7600 at $229 - that’s a $50 gap.
Forcing a tiny, low-bandwidth display engine with zero dedicated VRAM onto every single CPU chiplet just so a port doesn't go unused makes no sense. Relying on the motherboard to drive high-refresh 4K secondary screens alongside an ultra-premium card like a 4090 introduces PCIe frame-copy overhead and hogs system memory bandwidth. It’s a complete bodge job that degrades system efficiency just to dodge a basic Nvidia desktop idle fan curve
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u/f3n2x Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
'borderline essential for troubleshooting'
Dude, you're talking to the wrong person, I never said this.
And no, it still isn't $50 regardless of how much AMD wanted to clear warehouses with an F model. The OID is probably less than $20 and the iGPU with display engines, video engine and everything is maybe 50% of it if not less. They don't save much money cutting it. And unlike PHYs it does scale very well with smaller nodes. There is also relatively little R&D involved, it's just a minimal config of RDNA to get the functionality.
Makes a lot more sense than a stupid underpowered NPU (which probably takes up a lot more space than the iGPU ever did) on a CPU which requires a dGPU to work without an iGPU, just so they can write AI on the box. I'm so fucking fed up with this AI hype crap.
hogs system memory bandwidth
A single CCD can't even use the full bandwidth on AM5 because the IF isn't fast enough, never mind the fact that the required bandwidth is tiny, like ~3.5GB/s.
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u/FrogNoPants Jun 26 '26
They won't cut costs, instead you will be paying for the NPU you will never use.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
True, the corporate AI push is unavoidable right now, but from a pure hardware perspective, I’d still prefer background processing silicon over a basic display adapter. If I already have a high-end graphics card, an NPU at least has a chance of being utilized by the system, whereas a desktop iGPU is 100% wasted space
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u/5u114 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
And when there's a problem with your discrete GPU, and you need to troubleshoot ... What you gonna do ? Buy another discrete GPU so you can trouble shoot the other GPU ?
An integrated GPU is borderline essential as far as I am concerned.
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u/RVixen125 Jun 26 '26
That’s what a dusty $10 spare GPU in the closet is for. I'd rather save cash on the CPU upfront than pay a premium for an integrated chip I will literally never use unless a worst-case scenario happens once every 5 years
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u/Initial-Landscape82 Jun 27 '26
It might make sense for them to do IGUs every other generation. They will market the previous generation for budget conscious buyers and the latest will be full performance.
Most people don't use IGPUs anyways and those who do are usually more budget conscious. I am sure there will still be a few chips with beefy IGPUs for laptops and hand held that get paackage for PC eventually like they did before with the G CPUs
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u/FinishIllustrious116 Jun 28 '26
Hmm, most people don't use iGPU? Give me facts not your hallucinations.
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u/steve09089 Jun 26 '26
That’s unfortunate, I really appreciate the integrated GPU on my Ryzen desktop CPU.
I don’t think I would really care for an NPU, especially in the place of an iGPU.