Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Maskot via Getty)

Last month, California finalized a rule that will ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, starting in 2035. Obviously, that’ll accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles and encourage other states to do the same. (Oregon has already followed California’s lead.) But less obviously, spurning carbon-spewing vehicles could help buttress the United States’ ancient, creaky electrical grids.

Cars are no longer just modes of transportation; they are increasingly integrated into the larger energy infrastructure. If your EV is sitting in your garage fully charged (cars are typically parked 95 percent of the time) and you lose power, that big battery offers an opportunity to keep the lights on. And when there’s a sudden spike in demand for the grid—because everyone wants to turn on their AC during a heat wave or their heat during a deep freeze—utilities could pay homeowners for their excess battery power.

Enlarge / AMD's "Mendocino" processor is coming to budget laptops soon in the form of the Ryzen 7020 series. (credit: AMD)

At Computex earlier this year, AMD announced a processor called "Mendocino" that was intended to bring modern technology and 12-hour battery life to laptops in the unexciting-but-important $400 to $700 price range. Today, the company is bringing Mendocino to market in the form of three Athlon and Ryzen processors, collectively dubbed the 7020 series. AMD says laptops with these Mendocino-based processors will be available starting in Q4 of 2022, which is nearly upon us; launch systems include Lenovo's IdeaPad 1, Acer's Aspire 3, and a 17-inch laptop from HP.

The processor in the 7020 series is its least interesting element. It's a quad-core, eight-thread CPU (in the Ryzen chips; the Athlon chip is dual-core) based on 2019's Zen 2 architecture, previously seen in 3000-series Ryzen desktop processors and 4000- and 5000-series mobile processors. A Zen 2 CPU should be fast enough to make most basic browsing and office apps feel snappy, and they'll be preferable to the likes of Intel's Pentium and Celeron Silver chips (and probably also many of the upcoming Intel Processors). But they'll be slower than many 5000-series and 6000-series Ryzen CPUs, as well as quad-core-or-better, 11th-gen-and-up Core CPUs from Intel.

All three chips in AMD's 7020-series lineup. (credit: AMD)

All 7020-series CPUs include a new GPU based on AMD's RDNA2 GPU architecture, which is also found in its Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards, Ryzen 6000-series laptop processors, and the upcoming Ryzen 7000 desktop processors. AMD is including four of its graphics compute units (CUs) with every 7020-series CPU in a GPU that it has dubbed the Radeon 610M. That's one-third as many GPU cores as it includes in high-end Ryzen 6000 parts, but they should still be sufficient for very light gaming—AMD's press materials mention 720p gaming in competitive games like League of Legends, CS:GO, and DOTA 2.