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takyon writes:

AMD has announced "Mendocino", a mid-range chip for Windows and ChromeOS laptops that will launch in Q4 2022. The Mendocino die has a quad-core Zen 2 CPU and an unspecified amount of RDNA2 graphics cores, and uses LPDDR5 memory. It looks similar if not identical to the Van Gogh chip used in Valve's Steam Deck, except that it uses TSMC's "6nm" process instead of "7nm".

Seeing AMD planning to mint a new Zen 2-based APU in late 2022 is at first blush an unusual announcement, especially since the company is already two generations into mobile Zen 3. But for the low-end market it makes a fair bit of sense. Architecturally, Zen 3's CPU complexes (CCXes) are optimized for 8C designs; when AMD needs fewer cores than that (e.g. Ryzen 3 5400U), they've been using salvaged 8C dies. For Zen 2, on the other hand, the native CCX size is 4, which allows AMD to quickly (and cheaply) design an SoC based on existing IP blocks, as opposed to engineering a proper 4C Zen 3 CCX.

AMD's Ryzen 7000 series of desktop CPUs will launch this fall on a new AM5 socket, with a Land Grid Array (LGA) design. The heat spreader for the CPUs has cutouts on the top for capacitors, while the back is completely covered with pads (not pins like on AM4 CPUs). AM5 CPUs will only use dual-channel DDR5 memory, with no mixed DDR4/DDR5 support like Intel's latest Alder Lake CPUs.

Three new chipsets have been announced for the first AM5 motherboards: X670E (the 'E' is for "Extreme"), X670, and B650. These are differentiated primarily by the guaranteed level of support for PCIe 5.0 devices. X670E should support up to two PCIe 5.0 graphics card slots and multiple PCIe 5.0 SSDs, whereas B650 may only support a single PCIe 5.0 SSD, using PCIe 3/4 elsewhere. PCIe 5.0 x4 supports theoretical sequential read speeds of 16 GB/s, with SSDs in the real world likely reaching 14 GB/s.

The "6nm" I/O die inside Ryzen 7000 CPUs will include integrated RDNA2 graphics (again, an unspecified amount) and support up to 4 display outputs, including HDMI 2.1/DisplayPort 2.0. The move from a "14nm" GlobalFoundries I/O die down to TSMC "6nm" along with other improvements will likely lower idle power consumption.

L2 cache per Zen 4 core has been doubled to 1 MiB from Zen 3. A 16-core Ryzen 7000 chip was demonstrated boosting up to 5.5 GHz (single core), which could account for the majority of the CPU's performance increase given that AMD is currently only claiming a ">15% single-thread uplift" vs. Zen 3. The higher clock speeds could be due to the use of TSMC's "5nm" process for CPU cores, as well as a higher 170 Watt TDP/PPT. The CPUs will also include "expanded instructions" for "AI acceleration", which may refer to formats like bfloat16 and int8/int4, if not AVX-512.

See also: The Steam Deck APU gets a 6nm refresh to power AMD's best-in-class budget laptops

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