At the start of this year, AMD had revealed “Mendocino” – a processor that was aimed at bringing decent up to date performance coupled with a 12-hour long battery life in the budget category for laptops. Now, AMD has tweaked the Mendocino processor under 3 Athlon and Ryzen processors which are being touted as the 7020 series. As per AMD, laptops with the Mendocino processors will be coming to the market from the last quarter of 2022. Some of the first laptops to feature the new mid-ranger chipset will be Lenovo’s IdeaPad 1, Acer Aspire 3 and a big screen model from the stable of HP.
Branding and positioning by AMD aside, the processor in the 7020 series is perhaps the most uneventful it has been in the recent past. It sports a quad-core CPU with 8 threads for the Ryzen chips while the Athlon processors will come with a dual-core chipset based on the dated Zen 2 architecture from 2019. Zen 2 processors should be faster than Intel’s Pentium and Celeron Silver chips, making most basic office and internet applications feel quick to use. However, as for outright performance, they will be slower than many of the 5000-series and 6000-series Ryzen CPUs and the quad-core units from Intel, including their lineup from the 11 Gen and upwards.
On the graphics front, the 7020-series CPU come with AMD’s RDNA 2 GPU architecture which are also used in the Radeon RX 6000-series graphic cards, Ryzen 6000-series laptop processors and the soon-to-be-launched Ryzen 7000-series desktop processors. Light gaming should not be a problem for the 7020-series CPU and the company claims that 720p gaming in titles like DOTA 2 and CS:GO.
Similar to the Ryzen 6000 processors, AMD’s newer Mendocino chips are produced by TSMC using a 6 nm process, and they too require LPDDR5 memory. In the short term, requiring more expensive DDR5 memory may seem incompatible with low-cost laptops, but as more devices begin to support it and production picks up, all types of DDR5 RAM should gradually become more affordable.
