AMD Ryzen 3 7230U Mendocino APU appears in alleged benchmarks

What you need to know

• Alleged benchmarks have appeared online for an AMD Ryzen 3 7320U processor. 
• The Ryzen 3 7320U is one of AMD's upcoming Mendocino APUs that was announced at Computex 2022.
• Mendocino processors are made on Zen 2 architecture on the CPU side of things and RDNA 2 on the GPU side.

Benchmarks have appeared for an AMD Ryzen 3 7320U processor (via UserBenchmark). The APU is part of  AMD's lineup known as Mendocino, which was unveiled earlier this year. The benchmarks show a respectable score for single-core computing and lighter everyday use. The processor's graphics score is rather low, but that's to be expected from this particular APU.

AMD's Mendocino APUs are built with the best budget laptops in mind. The chips will power notebooks ranging from $399 to $699. When the company announced the processors at Computex 2022, it highlighted the fact that PCs with Mendocino APUs should get over 10 hours of battery life. These claims will have to be tested with review devices of course. In contrast, many budget laptops get between four and six hours of battery life.

The new APUs are built with TSMC's 6nm process. They utilize AMD's Zen 2 microarchitecture and feature RDNA 2 technology for graphics. The latter of those allows the processors to support more video encoding and decoding. This is a similar approach to what's seen in the Van Gogh APU of the Steam Deck, though the processors aim to fill different segments.

UserBenchmark explains how its scores are calculated and what they mean on its website. The long in short is that AMD's Ryzen 3 7320U looks solid for its price range, at least based on these scores.

With that context in mind, any benchmarks that rate the Ryzen 3 7320U for gaming seem a bit unnecessary, though they do provide some comparison to other chips. Neowin noted that the 5.63% graphics performance is better than that of AMD's Vega 3 iGPU (4.5%).

AMD expects to launch its new APUs in the fourth quarter of 2022.