AMD's Mendocino APU Specs Leak - It isn't the Steam Deck competitor we wanted
Mendocino will be a great chip for mainstream notebooks, but not a great chip for gamers
Published: 30th May 2022 | Source: @olrak29_ |
No, AMD's Mendocino APU won't compete with Valve's Steam Deck SOC
When AMD revealed their mainstream Mendocino SOC, they confirmed that their budget-oriented chip would offer users four Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA 2 graphics, delivering hardware specifications that are similar to Valve's Steam Deck handheld gaming system.
While AMD stated that this 6nm SOC was focused on mainstream notebooks, there were hopes that the SOC could become the chipset behind a series of Steam Deck rivals, handheld gaming PCs that could rival Valve's handheld within the portable gaming PC market. AYANEO's recent reveal of their Mendocino-powered $289 Air Plus raised these hopes further. Sadly, these hopes put overly high expectations on AMD's low-cost laptop SOC.
New Mendocino information leaks from @Olrak29_ have revealed that AMD's Mendocino chip will feature two RDNA 2 Compute Units and two 32-bit LPDDR5 memory channels. That four times fewer RDNA 2 compute units than Valve's custom Steam Deck SOC and half as many LPDDR5 memory channels. Simply put, Mendocino's GPU and memory configuration are not designed to be gaming-capable.
While AMD's Mendocino APU may not be a mobile gaming powerhouse, it will have the media playback capabilities of other RDNA 2 based integrated GPUs. This integrated GPU should be powerful enough to run some older PC games, but it is by no means a competitor to Valve's custom AMD Steam Deck SOC. Mendocino would be better used alongside a streaming service like Xbox Cloud Gaming, or Geforce Now to deliver a solid gaming experience.
You can join the discussion on AMD's leaked Mendocino APU Specifications on the OC3D Forums.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by meuvoy
I'm really not very familiar with AMD's mobile APU specs but I still think this should be better at gaming than a 5700U?
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Originally Posted by ET3D
The really big surprise here is "2-pipe FPU", which suggests something like Bulldozer.
No, it would be much worse. The 5700U has 8 CUs, and while they use the Vega architecture, which is weaker than RDNA 2, 2 CUs in Mendocino would at most equal 3 CUs of Vega. |
... Then this will basically be the equivalent of the modern Intel Celeron/Pentium CPUs a hard pass by default.QuoteWe will most likely see bigger on some Ryzen 5's and 7's
All the new desktop variants are rumored to have RDNA chips so i expect AMD will bring out a "gaming" chipQuote
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