AMD Announces Mendocino Mobile Processor, price and energy friendly

Zen 2 on 6nm with some rdna 2 cores sounds like a bunch of fun to play with

 

Wan't mendocino the codename of intel celeron 300+ mhz?

 

Yes, it is. From 1998 to 2000.
I admit I was a bit confused when I saw this name in 2022, referring to an AMD product.

 

If they are using Zen 2 for this, it must mean Zen 2 is better than Zen 3 for saving energy. Interesting indeed.

 

No, it means that they are using older tech to make cheaper chips (which is the whole purpose of these chips).

 

Either statement could be true. A lot of outdated architectures could perform extremely efficiently if manufactured on a modern node, depending on what you do. If you were to take a Pentium 4 and manufacture it on a 5nm node, I wouldn't be surprised if you could clock it to 5GHz and and it will still use less than 25W. Though, it would also be horribly slow at doing any modern tasks (or in some cases, just outright fail due to the lack of instructions or limited memory access).

Stuff like this is why RISC architectures are starting to take more interest, because if you're only performing real basic calculations or un-optimized code, you don't need all these bogus/excess instructions and backward compatibility. So, you're taking a barely-evolving architecture and just continuing to shrink the nodes to make it more efficient.

 

Could be, but in this case highly unlikely, seeing how Zen 2 works vs 3 on same power envelope on current CPUs.

 

I'd wager this is the same soc as the steam deck on an enhanced node, using zen 2 is probably for die space reasons, or simply because its a recycled design.