AMD Announces World’s First 5nm Desktop CPU and More

AMD’s latest product launch event, Computex 2022, kicked off a few hours ago. The American chipmaker had multiple major announcements to make including its next-generation desktop CPUs as well as new and affordable laptop processors.

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 CPU series is official as a direct successor to the highly successful Ryzen 5000 series and the company has also announced Mendocino mobile APUs (CPU+GPU) for affordable laptops.

We will go into technical details next.

AMD Ryzen 7000

AMD’s Ryzen 7000 family has been officially announced at Computex 2022. These are the world’s first desktop processors based on TSMC’s 5nm process and feature AMD’s next-gen Zen 4 architecture.

Ryzen 7000 and Zen 4 are quite similar to Zen 3, including a chiplet design with two Core Complex Dies (CCDs) based on TSMC’s 5 nm manufacturing process. AMD hasn’t shared detailed information on Zen 4 but has revealed it will come with 1MB of L2 cache per CPU core, which is twice as much as Zen 3 and Zen 2.

Ryzen 7000 is also bringing higher clock speeds thanks to the improved 5nm design. The company boasts 5GHz+ max turbo clock speeds, but in a demo video, AMD CEO Dr. Su showcased AMD’s pre-production 16 core Ryzen 7000 chip boosting to above 5.5GHz, which is a big leap over sub 5GHz systems.

As a result of instructions per clock (IPC) and clock speed improvements, AMD is claiming a 15% increase in performance over the last generation. AMD is also introducing a new 6 nm I/O die (IOD) as a replacement for the last generation’s 14nm IOD. The new IOD incorporates an iGPU, which is a first for AMD. This means that all Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be APUs as well.

Furthermore, AMD is announcing higher power usage as well, but official SKUs have not been announced yet. The Ryzen 7000 CPUs should allow for up to 170W in this generation, up from 105W on Ryzen 5000. The company has officially added support for PCIe 5.0 as well, just like Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs.

A full retail launch is scheduled for fall 2022.

Mendocino Mobile APUs

Alongside its big announcement for desktop CPUs, AMD has also unveiled new APUs for budget laptops. These new processors are codenamed “Mendocino” and are aimed at mainstream, high-volume Windows and ChromeOS notebooks.

With Mendocino’s release, AMD’s APUs will finally be up to date with the company’s GPU lineup thanks to its RDNA 2-based GPU. It is a relatively petite chip with 4 Zen 2 cores.

Here are Mendocino’s specifications compared with older generation Ryzen mobile processors.

AMD Mainstream Mobile Architectures
Mendocino Picasso
(Ryzen 3000C)
Dali
(Ryzen 3000C)
CPU Architecture Zen 2 Zen+ Zen (1)
CPU Cores 4C / 8T 4C / 8T 2C / 4T
GPU Architecture RDNA2 Vega Vega
GPU Cores N/A 10 3
Memory LPDDR5 DDR4 DDR4
Litho TSMC N6 GloFo 12nm GloFo 14nm

Credit: Anandtech

Unlike the CPU core count, AMD has not revealed the expected number of GPU cores, but given the intended market, the count will not be very high. This is because these chips are meant to enable entry-level performance while being power efficient and cheap. AMD says that Mendocino-powered laptops will be able to hit 10+ hours of battery life with mixed usage.

The new APU will be fed by LPDDR5 memory but AMD has not revealed whether it will be a dual-channel or quad-channel memory bus, though the latter is more likely.

Mendocino APUs are launching in Q4 this year, which means that AMD and its partners will be able to ship laptops by the end of December this year. It will be found in $399 – $699 laptops.



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