Not a great headline when the distinguishing feature of these chips is building a complete system without a dGPU. You can make an all-around solid computer with these, like the well-regarded new 13" Framework laptops but in a desktop, but they're not "extreme" or "gaming" devices the way buyers see those things.
Perhaps there just isn't enough of a market, but ASRock made a series of nice little machines they called DeskMinis with 5x5in motherboards that were a bit larger than NUCs, but in the extra space could fit a socketed 65W chip and quiet low-profile cooler (NUCs I've used were noisy under load), two full-length NVMe M.2 disks, and two 2.5" SATA drives.
An updated AM5 version could potentially ditch SATA to be smaller, since there isn't a huge premium on NVMe capacity now. I wonder if they could also handle some non-G chips, since those now have very basic iGPUs (though power and/or chipset requirements could still limit that).
One issue is that AM5 is still the relatively expensive option; AMD is still adding new AM4 5xxx SKUs because there's still seemingly a market for them. The DeskMini systems could be economical, and if a similar AM5 system couldn't be, due to the mobo itself needing to be pricy or the 8xxxG + DDR5 SODIMM cost, maybe it's hard to sell enough of them to get it to make sense. Still, it's a fun idea, and if you're listening, ASRock, I can promise you'd sell at least one.
Maybe they mean “extreme gaming,” for example if you are going to game while jumping out of a helicopter or something you can’t have a dGPU slowing you down.
I do not really expect that, but it's possible to have higher-performance iGPUs than PCs have now; the bandwidth of two memory channels is a big constraint here. Apple's M3 Pro and Max appear to use 3 to 8(!) channels (and of course a lot of die area) to achieve good GPU performance.
More channels may not even be physically possible in AM5. And economically any big change to build a super-iGPU has to compete with just not taping a bigger APU out and letting folks who want lots of oomph go discrete.
The other thing that can maybe help is cache. AMD uses cache dies in their datacenter APUs (very unlike laptop APUs) and of course their dGPUs. Way back, Intel also made a product with eDRAM to boost effective memory bandwidth (Crystalwell). For an integrated chip, that could also act as an "L4" for the CPU and help with its bandwidth needs, though the impact there will be lower than for the GPU.
Might be that AMD wants most gamers on these so they can sell their discrete GPU wares to the AI folks at double the revenue.
All the games market has been chasing graphically is diminishing returns in terms of pumping rasterized polygons. 4k gaming is kind of stupid.
Now the real time raytracing they are starting to do is interesting, but I noticed that has faded from the headlines as NVidia's stock exploded due to AI coprocessors.
Perhaps there just isn't enough of a market, but ASRock made a series of nice little machines they called DeskMinis with 5x5in motherboards that were a bit larger than NUCs, but in the extra space could fit a socketed 65W chip and quiet low-profile cooler (NUCs I've used were noisy under load), two full-length NVMe M.2 disks, and two 2.5" SATA drives.
An updated AM5 version could potentially ditch SATA to be smaller, since there isn't a huge premium on NVMe capacity now. I wonder if they could also handle some non-G chips, since those now have very basic iGPUs (though power and/or chipset requirements could still limit that).
One issue is that AM5 is still the relatively expensive option; AMD is still adding new AM4 5xxx SKUs because there's still seemingly a market for them. The DeskMini systems could be economical, and if a similar AM5 system couldn't be, due to the mobo itself needing to be pricy or the 8xxxG + DDR5 SODIMM cost, maybe it's hard to sell enough of them to get it to make sense. Still, it's a fun idea, and if you're listening, ASRock, I can promise you'd sell at least one.