AMD Reveals Chips for Next Wave of Cheap and Light Laptops

AMD calls them the "everyday mobile" laptops, but another way to think of them is budget-'n-back friendly -- low-power, lightweight laptops that are always in high demand. In the cycle of CPU launches, the chips powering these systems are typically the first in any generation to debut, bearing the new generation names on last-generation technologies. 

In this case, the Ryzen 5 7250U, Ryzen 3 7320U and Athlon Gold 7220U bring some notable upgrades to buyers of laptops around less than $800 (around £700, AU$1,200), including current-generation RDNA 2 integrated graphics (Radeon 610M) for more responsive screen rendering and passable gaming at 720p, up to 12 hours of battery life and better support for Windows 11 features intended to improve web conferencing, security and power management. 

New laptops with the 7020U-series chips inside are expected to start shipping by the end of the year, and AMD highlights the Lenovo Ideapad 1, HP 17 and Acer Aspire 3 as models you can expect to incorporate them at that time. 

The 7020U CPUs use AMD's recently overhauled naming convention, which offers better transparency about the class of CPU; the name includes the year announced, the market segment, architecture, class within the market segment and target power consumption (which usually dictates size and weight).

Although they're not based on cutting-edge architectures, the new CPUs are produced using a 6nm process and support LPDDR5 memory. The smaller process automatically confers some performance improvements and LPDDR5 memory is faster than previous generations. They also add support for BGA NVMe SSD, a form of solid-state storage that's cheaper, more compact and more power efficient than traditional slot-based SSD (and still faster than non-SSD media), which should make higher capacities, especially in Chromebooks, possible. That means potentially much faster application launching.