During the inaugural keynote of its participation in Computex this year, AMD has presented a new line of APUs, known as AMD Mendocino. With this new series, the Sunnyvale company wants to give OEMs a solution to be able to create cheapest laptopsbut without having to give up offering a good level of performance.
AMD Mendocino APUs integrate CPU and GPU in the same package, and are manufactured in the node of 6nm from TSMC. The CPU is based on Zen 2 architecturehas four cores and eight threads and has an RDNA2 GPU, that is, with a new generation solution whose performance is significantly higher than that of the previous APUs, which were based on the veteran Vega.
AMD has expressly confirmed that in order for that integrated RDNA2 GPU to perform to its full potential and for memory bandwidth not to be an issue, all laptops using AMD Mendocino APUs will mount LPDDR5 memory. This type of memory is integrated and can be configured with a 64-bit bus or a 128-bit bus, which means that it will be able to offer good enough bandwidth for the GPU to give its best.
In essence, AMD Mendocino is an adaptation of the APU that Valve has used in the Steam Deck, with the particularity that it comes manufactured at the 6nm node, and not at the 7nm node like the one on that console. Thanks to these new AMD APUs, the main OEMs, such as Lenovo, for example, will be able to offer economical but powerful laptops, and with a range of up to 10 hours of use per battery charge.
The prices that AMD has confirmed go from 399 to 699 dollars, which in exchange could translate, after applying taxes, into about 499-799 euros. These new APUs will be used in both inexpensive Windows 11 laptops and Chrome OS-based PCs, and will be available starting in the last quarter of this year. These APUs are below the newer Ryzen 6000, but are capable of delivering a good level of performance.
