At the start of the new low-end processors, some technical details were missing, which AMD has now supplied.
At the start of AMD’s low-end processors from the new Mendocino series, a few technical details were still missing, which the company has now supplied to us. The processors have their own design, namely the BGA format FT6. They therefore do not fit on notebook mainboards intended for more powerful Ryzen processors, but require their own developments. But that’s no surprise; Even Intel’s low-end processors like the Pentium Silver N6000 cannot share mainboards with thicker Core i processors.
While the three initial models Ryzen 5 7520U, Ryzen 3 7320U and Athlon Gold 7220U differ in terms of number of cores and clock rates, the integrated graphics unit Radeon 610M is identical: There are two Compute Units (CUs) everywhere. This corresponds to the expansion that the previously unveiled Ryzen 7000 processors have for desktop PCs, but is much less than the mobile processors of the Ryzen 6000U family, which have up to twelve CUs.
Rapid USB4 with 40 Gbit/s is also reserved for more powerful CPU series: Mendocino is limited to long-established USB speeds of a maximum of 10 Gbit/s. After all, fast SSDs can also be used, because PCIe version 4.0 is on board – we had previously only assumed PCIe 3.0. And the main memory is generally only state-of-the-art LPDDR5 (two memory channels, maximum LPDDR5-5500).
No notebooks in sight yet
We still have to remain guilty of how well Mendocino is doing in practice. AMD states that its newcomers outperform counterparts such as the Core i3-1115G4. But while this has been available for purchase in a number of notebooks for some time now, there is still no sign of systems with 7020 processors on the market.
It therefore remains to be seen whether the first Mendocino notebooks will actually be in stores before Christmas as promised by AMD. And due to the pending announcements by the manufacturers themselves, it is also still unclear what euro prices to expect in this country.
