AMD’s first mobile Ryzen 7000 CPU is a mix of old and new for mid-range laptops

At Computex earlier this year, AMD announce A processor called the “Mendocino” was intended to provide modern technology and up to 12 hours of battery life for laptops in the not-so-exciting but significant price range of $400-$700. Today, the company brings Mendocino to the market in the form of three Athlon and Ryzen processors, collectively called the 7020 series. AMD says that laptops with these Mendocino-based processors will be available starting in the fourth quarter of 2022, which is close to us; Launch systems include Lenovo’s IdeaPad 1, Acer’s Aspire 3, and HP’s 17-inch laptop.

The processor in the 7020 series is the least interesting component. It’s a four-core, eight-thread CPU (in Ryzen chips; a dual-core Athlon chip) based on the 2019 Zen 2 architecture, previously seen in 3000-series Ryzen desktop processors and 4000- and 5000-series mobile processors. The Zen 2’s CPU should be fast enough to make basic browsing and office apps feel fast, and it’ll be preferred over the likes of Intel’s Pentium and Celeron Silver chips (and probably also many more to come). Intel processors). But it will be slower than many 5000-series and 6000-series Ryzen CPUs, as well as quad-core or better CPUs, 11th generation and above from Intel.

All 7020 series CPUs include a new GPU based on AMD’s RDNA2 GPU architecture, which is also found in Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, Ryzen 6000 laptop processors, and upcoming Ryzen 7000 desktop processors. AMD houses four of its graphics computing units (CUs) with each 7020-series CPU in a GPU dubbed the Radeon 610M. This is one third of the number of GPU cores as included in High-end Ryzen 6000 Partsbut should still suffice for very light gaming – AMD press materials mention 720p gaming in competitive games like league of legendsAnd the CS: GOAnd the Dota 2.

Depending on the laptop’s port selection, the GPU can also power up to four displays simultaneously, including the integrated display panel. As RDNA2 GPUs, they get the same video encoding and decoding support as higher-end models, including decoding support for the AV1 codec.

Like the Ryzen 6000 processors, these Mendocino chips are built using TSMC’s 6nm process, and require LPDDR5 memory – in the near term, forcing expensive DDR5 memory seems the antithesis of lower-priced laptops, but all kinds of DDR5 RAM should become Steadily cheaper over the next year or two as more devices support it and manufacturing ramps up. Processors also include Microsoft Pluton security devices.

Mendocino CPUs are the first glimpse of AMD’s new laptop processor naming scheme is underway. The number “7” at the beginning of the number simply indicates that AMD is including it as part of the 2023 family of processors, while the number “2” in the third number indicates that it is using the Zen 2 processor architecture. The second number will range from 2 for the low-level dual-core Athlon Gold 7220U Core down to 5 for the quad-core Ryzen 5 7520U, with the quad-core Ryzen 3 7320U in between.