A purported early benchmark test of a Windows 11 PC system packing an AMD Mendocino APU has appeared in the online UserBenchmark database. Twitter data miner Tum Apisak unearthed this link, which attests that the FT6 socket AMD engineering sample offers "good" CPU performance but "terrible" GPU performance, giving us a mixed outing for one of the first sitings of a Ryzen 7000 chip in the wild — albeit one that comes as an APU with the Zen 2 architecture. At least for now. As with all engineering sample (ES) CPU benchmark test results, these are on early silicon that likely has quite a bit more tuning needed before the final products hit shelves and vie for a spot on our list of best CPUs for gaming. We also have to caution that the results haven't been confirmed.
Above you can see, the CPU portion of the APU offers a 4C/8T configuration with base/boost clocks of 2.4/4.1 GHz. This puts in a decent performance for what it is, but please note that quad-core CPUs are falling out of favor with gamers in 2022. Nevertheless, the CPU's specs and performance align with expectations from the official outline of the product that AMD shared during Computex.
As the Mendocino APUs are aimed at good value everyday laptops, AMD settled on using Zen 2 cores, and you won't find any member of this family with a higher core count than 4C/8T. One change delivered to the cores in this APU is that AMD has taken advantage of TSMC's N6 process node. N6 benefits for TSMC are better yield and shorter production cycles compared to N7, and customers get 18% higher logic density over the N7 process with compatible design rules.
Moving along, in the lower half of the screen grab from UserBenchmark, you can see the Radeon Graphics portion of the APU appears to fare badly in the widest possible comparison. Unfortunately, UserBenchmark omits any useful specs regarding GPUs under test, which is a shame.
At Computex, AMD confirmed that Mendocino used the RDNA 2 graphics architecture, a welcome addition to value and mainstream APUs. Still, it wasn't forthcoming about the number of RDNA 2 compute units (CUs) the APUs would come packing. We noted with optimism that the Radeon 680M, Rembrandt's highest-end iGPU, comes with 12 RDNA 2 compute units. However, a leak a fortnight ago provided some evidence that Mendocino would be limited to 2 CUs – much weaker in the graphics department than we would have hoped. Today's benchmarks appear to confirm a very weak GPU, which could well be that there are simply so few CUs available.
It is becoming plain to see that Mendocino isn't going to enable Steam Deck-like good value gaming laptops, just good value everyday laptops. For example, according to UserBenchmark data, the GPU in the Ryzen 3 7320U is approximately equal to the Intel UHD Graphics 730. Still, it should be a noticeable improvement over the AMD RX Vega 3 (a previous AMD graphics architecture iGPU, with 3 CUs).
Other parts in the UserBenchmarked machine appeared to confirm its 'everyday' status; a total of 4GB of DDR5 RAM (2x LPDDR5-6400 2GB modules) and the single fixed storage device - a 256GB NVMe drive.
Lastly, the information presented above does come from a public database. People sometimes fake data like this for fun or the benchmark could be a benchmark sysinfo detection error, so please take the results discussed with a pinch of salt.
