AMD launches Ryzen/Athlon 7020C “Mendocino” APU series for Chromebooks

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AMD launches Mendocino for Chromebooks

The company introduced Zen2 based low-power APUs for Chromebooks.  


 
Officially AMD 7020C series is to include four SKUs, featuring from 2, up to 4 cores. The ‘flagship’ SKU called Ryzen 5 7520C has 4 cores, and it boosts up to 4.3 GHz. The slowest variant is actually part of the Athlon family (Silver 7120C) and only has 2 cores boosting up to 3.5 GHz without SMT (multi-threading) support. Each processor is equipped with Radeon 610M integrated graphics which should feature 2 Compute Units.

AMD is claiming that their 7020C series will offer up to 19.5 hours of battery life (up to 28% longer than competition), one of the key features of this new processor. What should be noted is that these CPUs are not based on Zen4 or even Zen3 architecture, but rely on Zen2, although it is manufactured with 6 nm node. Furthermore, the integrated graphics feature RDNA2 architecture, although they are from being ‘gaming capable’.


 
AMD compared its latest 7020C APUs to Zen1 based Ryzen 3000C series as well as some MediaTek Kompanio mobile SoCs. The manufacturer is claiming that their 7320C processor is up to 1.6x faster on average on a Chromebook and offers up to 15% performance advantage than competing (MediaTek) products while giving longer battery life (depends on an SKU).

The key advantages of choosing AMD APU for Chromebook is support for up to 4K 60Hz displays thanks to Radeon 610M RDNA2 iGPU, higher memory speed (LPDDR5), support for WiFi-6 and Bluetooth 5.2 and increased security features.

Only two products were announced today, the ASUS Chromebook CM32 Flip and Dell Latitude 3445. According to AMD, those Chromebooks should be available this quarter.


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