Along with its major desktop update later in the year, AMD is also using this year’s Computex to announce an update to the low-end segment of its mobile range. In the fourth quarter of this year, the company will release a new chip codenamed “Mendocino”, which is aimed at mass, large laptops with Windows and ChromeOS. With 4 Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 graphics, the relatively small chip is designed to fit into laptops in the range of $ 399 to $ 699.
Based on the planned market segment, AMD Mendocino (not affiliated with Intel) is positioned as the successor to a combination of lower-end AMD SoC products, including the bottom of Ryzen’s mobile stack (eg Ryzen 5300U) and the Chips from AMD Ryzen C-class. Mass laptops are a huge part of the market in terms of volume, and for both good and bad reasons, this has always been an area where AMD has done well. And while the current chip shortage is not fully resolved, AMD is finally able to update the lower end of its APU range with newer hardware built on a newer manufacturing process, replacing their current mix of mostly Picasso (4C) 12nm Zen +) based SKU.
Basic AMD mobile architectures
AnandTech
Mendocino Picasso (Ryzen 3000C) Dali (Ryzen 3000C) Processor architecture Zen 2 Zen + Zen (1) Processor cores 4C / 8T 4C / 8T 2C / 4T Graphics processor architecture RDNA2 Vega Vega GPU cores N / AN / A DDR4 DDR10 DDR4 LDR5 GloFo 12nm GloFo 14nm
As AMD revealed tonight, Mendocino is a small, efficient SoC designed for what the company considers mass-produced laptops. The main specifications are an interesting combination of hardware – on the CPU side these are 4 CPU cores Zen 2 (not Zen 3), and on the GPU side the chip will be available with an integrated GPU with RDNA2 architecture.
Seeing that AMD plans to launch a new Zen 2 APU at the end of 2022, this is an unusual announcement at first glance, especially since the company is already two generations in the mobile Zen 3. But for the low-end market, it makes a lot of sense. . Architecturally, the Zen 3 CPU complexes (CCX) are optimized for 8C designs; when AMD needed fewer cores than that (e.g. Ryzen 3 5400U), they used saved 8C matrices. For Zen 2, on the other hand, the native size of CCX is 4, which allows AMD to quickly (and cheaply) design a SoC based on existing IP blocks, as opposed to designing a proper 4C Zen 3 CCX.
Meanwhile, the RDNA2 GPU is still the pinnacle of AMD. Unlike the number of processor cores, AMD does not disclose the expected number of GPU cores / CUs here, but given the target market, it will not be very large – so we do not expect the implementation of Mendocino to be particularly fast. However, it offers AMD’s designers the latest and most efficient graphical IP of the company, and also allows them to benefit from support for the latest video codecs. Something more important than it may seem at first glance, as AMD needs to ensure that the new APU is able to fully speed up video encoding and decoding for video conferencing software. The Ryzen 6000 Mobile supports everything down to AV1 decoding, so it’s a reasonable bet that Mendocino will be the same.
The power supply of the Mendocino will be LPDDR5 memory. At this time, AMD does not specify whether it will be a dual-channel (64-bit) or four-channel (128-bit) memory bus, and while the latter is much more likely, given the target market segment, it should not be taken for granted. .
Overall, the new chip is very similar to AMD’s Aerith APU (codename: Van Gogh), a semi-personalized chip used in Valve’s Steam Deck handheld console. But while Aerith is built on TSMC’s 7nm process, Mendocino builds on TSMC 6nm, the same process as the Ryzen Mobile 6000 family. So despite its high-level architectural similarities, Mendocino is Aerith’s smallest shrinkage / port.
The big boost for Mendocino from AMD, in addition to refreshing the lower-end range of their range, is also on improving the battery life of lower-end laptops. AMD predicts that Mendocino laptops will be able to last more than 10 hours of battery life in “mixed use” scenarios, which would be a significant improvement over some of the lower-end laptops on the market today. Especially compared to the Picasso-based SKUs that this chip will replace, Mendocino benefits from significantly newer power management technologies that AMD first developed for the Ryzen 6000 Mobile family. The transition to TSMC 6nm should also help, although it ultimately depends on where AMD chooses to clock the CPU and GPU cores.
Concluding, according to AMD, Mendocino will launch in the fourth quarter of this year. If it arrives early enough in the quarter, AMD and its partners should be able to launch Mendocino-based laptops just in time for the holiday shopping. Lenovo is already planning to use the chip in the upcoming Ideapad 1 laptop, and no doubt the other usual AMD partners will also have their own laptops.
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