AMD “Mendocino” APUs promise performance and efficiency gains for mainstream laptops

AMD didn't just share details on its upcoming Ryzen 7000 series processors and AM5 motherboards at Computex, the company also gave us a sneak peek at upcoming APUs for laptops. Codenamed “Mendocino”, these new APUs aim to bring more performance and battery life to low-cost, mainstream laptops. Interestingly, the new APU also appears to be similar to the chip powering the Steam Deck. 

Based on the 6nm process node from TSMC, the new Mendocino APUs will come with four Zen 2 cores (initially designed using TSMC's 7nm node), eight threads, and an RDNA 2 iGPU. As per the marketing material, laptops packing these chips will offer over 10 hours of mixed usage battery life, enough for an entire workday of use. Clock speeds, memory support and other details have yet to be unveiled.

Notebooks with Mendocino APUs will be available in Windows-based laptops and Chromebooks priced between $399 and $699. The marketing material shows the Lenovo Ideapad 1 will be one such device, but other manufacturers such as HP, Acer and Asus should release systems using the upcoming APUs.

AMD stated the new Mendocino APUs will be available in laptops in Q4 2022. Expect to learn more about these new chips in the coming months.

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KitGuru says: On paper, the new Mendocino APUs look a lot like Steam Deck's Aerith SoC, using the same 6nm Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 GPU. Considering what we already know about the console, these laptops could be a good option for anyone looking for a general-purpose notebook that doesn't break the bank.

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