After announcing them in China, AMD quietly added the Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F to its website and confirmed that both chips will be making a worldwide debut. The new CPUs are a derivative of AMD's Zen 4-based Phoenix APUs lacking integrated graphics and a neural processing unit (NPU) for AI hardware acceleration. Pricing was not unveiled, but expect these two chips to be cheaper than their Ryzen 8000G-series counterparts.
AMD originally announced the two chips in China as part of a new strategy to bring Ryzen to "every price point" in the marketplace. However, it never shared official specifications of the new F-series SKUs. Now that both CPUs have been added to AMD's website, we have confirmed specifications of the two new budget-friendly Zen-4 alternatives.
The Ryzen 7 8700F features eight Zen-4 CPU cores, 16 threads, 8MB of L2 cache, and 16MB of L3 cache along with a default TDP of 65W (that is configurable down to 45W). Base clock is rated at 4.1 GHz and the max boost clock peaks at 5 GHz flat.
The Ryzen 5 8400F is essentially a downclocked version of the 8700F with two fewer cores. The 8400F comes with six Zen 4 cores, 12 threads, 6MB of L2 cache, and 16MB of L3 cache. TDP is 65W (configurable to 45W), base clock is 4.2 GHz and the chip's max boost clock is 4.7 GHz.
Compared to AMD's outgoing Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G. The 8700F is clocked 100 MHz less on the base and boost clock compared to the 8700G. The 8400F is clocked 100 MHz less than the 8600G on the base clock, but is clocked 300 MHz less on the boost clock. Neither the 8700F and 8400F don't come with integrated graphics or an XDNA NPU.
The good news is that AMD did not ban overclocking from these chips (unlike its Ryzen 7000X3D chips). So users can potentially overclock these F-series SKUs to their G-series counterparts if desired. If you are willing to delid your chip, you could have even more overclocking headroom available as well.
Similar to Intel's F-series CPUs and AMD's other F-series CPUs, these new Zen 4 chips are built from recycled silicon that might have a defective graphics unit and/or NPU inside. This improves AMD's production efficiency and reduces excess waste which would be the case if it threw out every single APU it made with a bad GPU/NPU.
Pricing is the only piece of information we are still missing. But, if AMD wants these CPUs to excel, it needs to price both below not only the 8700G and 8600G but under the Ryzen 7 7700 and Ryzen 5 7600 as well. Both of the Ryzen 7000 counterparts sport integrated graphics and double the L3 cache capacity (not to mention better boost clocks).
