What you need to know
- AMD just announced its Mendocino Zen 2 APUs featuring RDNA 2 graphics.
- The new processors promise over 10 hours of battery life for laptops ranging from $399 to $699.
- AMD is expected to launch the new APUs in Q4 2022.
AMD announced its new Mendocino mobile APUs today at Computex 2022. The new processors are designed to power the best budget laptops, ranging from $399 to $699. According to AMD, devices running the new chips will get over 10 hours of battery life.
Mendocino APUs are made on AMD’s Zen 2 microarchitecture and RDNA 2 technology. As noted by Tom’s Hardware, this is a similar approach to how the company built its Van Gogh APU, including the processor inside the Steam Deck.
AMD’s Mendocino APUs are built with TSMC’s 6nm processor. They’ll feature four Zen 2 cores with eight threads. Specific benchmark and performance figures weren’t shared by AMD at its keynote. Tom’s Hardware suspects that the chips could deliver similar performance to AMD’s Ryzen 4000 processors.
RDNA 2 support in the new APUs means that systems will support more video encoding and decoding.
The biggest takeaway from AMD’s announcement is its promise of over 10 hours of battery life. This is a projected figure, and AMD didn’t share the specifics of its mixed-usage testing, but it’s quite the lofty claim. Most budget laptops deliver between four and six hours of battery life. If systems running Mendocino APUs come anywhere near 10 hours of real-world usage, they’ll stand out from competing devices.
“Most people are used to four, five, six hours on a notebook in the $399 to $699 space,” said AMD technical marketing director Robert Hallock. “At a minimum, we want 10 hours out of these notebooks.”
AMD is expected to ship its Mendocino APUs starting in the fourth quarter of 2022.
