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

pcgamer.com:

AMD's wheeling out what looks like a modified version of the Steam Deck's Aerith APU to power a new range of budget gaming laptops it's codenamed AMD Mendocino. The Mendocino program, introduced during AMD's Computex keynote, is designed to create a new class of notebooks in the $399 — $599 category with unprecedented power and battery life.

Okay, it's not the exact Steam Deck APU, but it sure bears more than a passing resemblance to it. This is a quad-core, eight-thread Zen 2-based APU, that still sports RDNA 2 GPU cores, and also supports LPDDR5. 

So yeah, pretty similar. The only difference I can see for right now is that its manufactured on a TSMC 6nm node, as opposed to the 7nm node Valve's handheld operates with. AMD hasn't said anything about the compute unit count, but hopefully it won't be any lower than the eight CUs of the Deck's Aerith.

Being similar to the Steam Deck's APU is definitely no bad thing for a notebook, because with the larger footprint you can offer more cooling, more power, and space for higher capacity batteries. That would potentially allow AMD, and whoever it partners with in the Mendocino program, to up the clock speeds of the chip, on both CPU and GPU sides, and eat up more than the 15W TDP of the Steam Deck's processor.

And offering more than a 40Whr battery would make a big difference in terms of up time. That's something AMD sees as a must for a Mendocino laptop.

«Combining Zen2 cores with the best and the brightest of the Ryzen 6000 series,» says Robert Hallock, AMD marketing director for Ryzen CPUs at our Computex briefing, «you get Ryzen 6000 series graphics with RDNA2, you get Ryzen 6000 series battery life, you get Ryzen 6000 series video encode and decode, and you get a huge bump