At Computex earlier this year, AMD announced a processor called the Mendocino, designed to deliver state-of-the-art technology and 12-hour laptop battery life in the unexciting but important $400 to $700 price range. Today, the company is bringing Mendocino to market in the form of three Athlon and Ryzen processors, collectively called the 7020 series. AMD says laptops with these Mendocino-based processors will be available starting in Q4 2022, which is almost there; Launch systems include the Lenovo IdeaPad 1, Acer Aspire 3, and a 17-inch laptop from HP.
The processor in the 7020 series is the least interesting element. This is a quad-core, eight-thread processor (in Ryzen chips; Athlon chip is dual-core) based on the 2019 Zen 2 architecture previously used in the Ryzen 3000 series desktop and 4000 and 5000 series mobile processors. The Zen 2 processor must be fast enough to most basic web and office applications were fast and would be preferred over Intel Pentium and Celeron Silver chips (and likely many of Intel’s future processors as well). But they will be slower than many Ryzen 5000 and 6000 series processors, as well as quad-core or higher 11th generation and higher Core processors from Intel.
All 7020 series processors include a new GPU based on AMD’s RDNA2 GPU architecture, which is also used in the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards, Ryzen 6000 series laptop processors, and the upcoming Ryzen 7000 desktop processors. AMD incorporates four of its Graphics Compute Units (CUs) with each 7020 series processor into a GPU it calls the Radeon 610M. That’s three times as many GPU cores as the high-end Ryzen 6000 components, but should be enough for very light gaming – AMD’s press materials mention playing at 720p in competitive titles like League of Legends, CS:GO, and DOTA. 2.
Depending on the laptop’s port selection, the GPU can also drive up to four displays simultaneously, including the built-in display panel. And like 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 also require LPDDR5 memory – in the short term, the mandatory more expensive DDR5 memory seems to be incompatible with low-end laptops, but all kinds of DDR5 RAM should steadily become cheaper in over the next year or two as more devices support it and production ramps up. The processors also include Microsoft Pluton security hardware.
Mendocino processors is our first look at AMD’s new laptop processor naming scheme in action. The “7”at the beginning of the number simply means that AMD is including it in its 2023 processor line, while the “2”in the third digit indicates that it is using the Zen 2 processor architecture. The second digit will range from 2 for the junior dual-core Athlon Gold 7220U up to 5 for the quad-core Ryzen 5 7250U, with the quad-core Ryzen 3 7320U in between.