AMD reveals new mobile Zen 2 based Ryzen and Athlon 7020 series Mendocino processors

[AndreiArgeanu]

Summary

AMD has revealed their new Zen 2 based processors of their new 7020 series lineup. So far there's only 3 models with the highest end being the ryzen 5 7520U with 4c/8t and the lowest end being the athlon gold 7220U with 2c/4t. AMD compared their Ryzen 3 7320U to Intel's 11th gen i3 1115G4 and claim significantly higher performance in benchmarks like PCMark10, Cinebench R23 and 7zip compression. The chips come with Radeon 610M graphics based on the RDNA2 architecture.

 

Quotes

Quote

AMD Ryzen™ 7020 Series Ecosystem Support

• Acer: “From thin-and-lights to rugged laptops, Acer provides a wide variety of products for customers with different needs,” said James Lin, General Manager, Notebooks, IT Products Business, Acer Inc. “With the introduction of AMD Ryzen 7020 Series processors, the new Acer Aspire 3 14 and Aspire 3 15 laptops with the new processors provide the perfect blend of performance and value.”
• HP: “With the new HP 17 inch Laptop PC – powered by Ryzen 7020 Series processors – people will have the freedom and flexibility to work and play however and whenever they want,” said Jo Tan, Global Head of Consumer PCs, Personal Systems, HP Inc. “Together with AMD, we’re delivering the performance and experiences our customers need to stay connected, productive, and entertained.” 
• Lenovo: “We’re taking speed and efficiency to a new level in collaboration with AMD,” said Ouyang Jun, Vice President and General Manager of the Consumer Business Segment, Intelligent Devices Group. “With the trusted power and efficiency of AMD Ryzen processors, our next generation of consumer PCs, such as Lenovo IdeaPad, will offer the performance required for everyday multitasking and collaboration – all while fitting into a wider range of budgets.”
• Microsoft: “We are excited to see the deep AMD and Microsoft co-engineering collaboration come to life on Ryzen 7020 Series processor-powered systems enabled with Windows 11,” said Pavan Davuluri, CVP Windows Silicon and Systems Integration. “Premium experiences don’t have to come at a premium price as customers will enjoy things like stellar battery life, graphics performance with RDNA 2, and security capabilities with VBS acceleration and chip-to-cloud security features enabled by the built-in Microsoft Pluton security processor.”

AMD Ryzen™ and Athlon™ 7020 Series Processors for Mobile

Model	Cores/ Threads	Boost Frequency5	Base Frequency	Total Cache (MB)	TDP (Watts)	GPU Model
AMD Ryzen™ 5 7520U	4C/8T	Up to 4.3 GHz	2.8 GHz	6 MB	15 W	AMD Radeon™ 610M
AMD Ryzen™ 3 7320U	4C/8T	Up to 4.1 GHz	2.4 GHz	6 MB	15 W	AMD Radeon™ 610M
AMD Athlon™ Gold 7220U	2C/4T	Up to 3.7 GHz	2.4 GHz	5 MB	15 W	AMD Radeon™ 610M

CPU performance is still solid

The AMD Ryzen and Athlon 7020 series comes with up to four cores and eight threads based on AMD’s Zen 2 architecture, but with some enhancements since their original models. These processors are built on a 6nm process, and they come with up to 4 cores and eight threads, capable of boosting up to 4.3GHz.

AMD compared the performance of the AMD Ryzen 3 7320U to an 11th-generation Intel Core i3-1115G4, and as you’d expect with these kinds of official comparisons, it came out on top. AMD touts up to 31% faster performance in PCMark 10 productivity tests, 58% faster multitasking in Cinebench R23, and 80% faster file compression in 7-Zip. The company also boasts 31% faster app startup based on the PCMark 10 benchmark.

RDNA2 graphics for the entry level

The big news with the AMD Ryzen and Athlon 7020 series is that they bring AMD’s RDNA2 graphics architecture to entry-level laptops, and that’s where you’ll probably find the most interesting differentiating factor in these processors. All the models in this lineup – even the Athlon Gold 7220U – come with AMD Radeon 610M graphics based on RDNA2, promising solid performance and battery life.

On the Athlon Gold 7220U, AMD claims you can get up to 97 frames per second in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, 84 FPS in League of Legends, and 61 FPS in DOTA2, all while running at 720p resolution. For integrated graphics on an entry-level processor, that’s pretty good, and it should make gaming that much more accessible.

Additionally, AMD touts support for up to four displays, along with AV1 decoding support for high-resolution video streaming.

 

 

My thoughts

  These chips will end up in entry level laptops at the end of the day. The RDNA2 integrated graphics do have pretty good performance especially given they are entry level chips plus the AV1 decoding support. Although I feel like the comparison AMD should have done is to compare their Ryzen 3 7320U to the i3 1215U instead of the i3 1115G4 since the newer 12th gen chips comes with 2 performance cores and 4 efficiency making it significantly more competitive than the 2c/4t i3 1115G4

 

Sources

AMD

XDA Developers

[Jito463]

I'm a bit surprised these are based on Zen 2.  I was expecting Zen 3 or even them already being on Zen 4.

[Fasterthannothing]

AMD what are you doing?? zen 2?? Honestly AMD has been leaving me scratching my head 

[porina]

Someone with more motivation than me might be able to work out the transistors/core for each generation. I'm willing to bet Zen 2 is still used because it is smaller and cheaper than its newer relatives. If made on a newer process it could even out-perform the original Zen 2 CPUs in efficiency.

[GOTSpectrum]

1 hour ago, porina said:

Someone with more motivation than me might be able to work out the transistors/core for each generation. I'm willing to bet Zen 2 is still used because it is smaller and cheaper than its newer relatives. If made on a newer process it could even out-perform the original Zen 2 CPUs in efficiency.

Basically this, area/core is lower for Zen2 than the later archs. for lower end stuff it makes more sense to have these on the older arch as they get more chips per wafer, and with it being entry lvl stuff being as cheap as possible and as low energy as possible is most important. 

 

Power is especially important for low end devices as spending even $1 more on the cooling system could make it cheaper to go with a competitor rather than AMD.

 

The GPU shows that they aren't just recycling an older design, but have made a concerted effort to use Zen2.

 

Also, you can see this trying to maximise the functional chips per wafer with the relatively low cache values. Cache takes up masses amounts of space, and although as we see on the X3D that it can lead to massive performance increases, the type of device these will be going into, manufacturers are more bothered about the chip being 45cents less rather than being 3% faster 

[yolosnail]

3 hours ago, Fasterthannothing said:

AMD what are you doing?? zen 2?? Honestly AMD has been leaving me scratching my head 

It was announced at the Zen 4 launch that they would be using several different architectures in the mobile 7000 series.

And it's not as if they're hiding it, the third digit in the SKU tell you what Zen architecture it uses, so 7X2X for Zen 2, 7X3X for Zen 3 etc.

 

To be honest, it makes sense. As long as the performance and efficiency is there, why not use Zen 2?

It's still a great architecture, and no doubt cheaper to produce than newer architectures that really have no benefit on the low end

[AlTech]

12 hours ago, Jito463 said:

I'm a bit surprised these are based on Zen 2.  I was expecting Zen 3 or even them already being on Zen 4.

Zen3 and Zen4 are expensive to make. Athlon prior to this was still on Zen+.

 

AMD did also say these parts are designed for cheap devices.

[Doobeedoo]

Most was said in this convo but yeah while odd maybe makes sense for them price wise for lower end chips if perf stacks well.

[ToboRobot]

Low cost SBC please!

[snappercayt]

On 10/3/2022 at 6:21 PM, ToboRobot said:

Low cost SBC please!

was thinking the same! they need to do it - will give great competition to low power Intel powered SBCs

[Guest]

The move to just keep on making Zen 2 seems funny to me, but I'm more excited on RDNA GPUs trickling down to budget CPUs (err, APUs) now.

 

I can see gaming potential, but I've seen that GPU before, it's an okay GPU. I will not expect this to run Cyberpunk 2077 but then again I didn't play that anyways on that.

 

Who knows, maybe low cost laptops will finally have good GPUs for me to play video games in the future.