Lenovo stealthily adds AMD Mendocino APU options to its IdeaPad 1 budget laptops

Even though AMD announced the Mendocino mobile processors with Zen 2 cores and RDNA 2 iGPUs back in September, laptop OEMs are not really rushing to offer devices powered by these budget-oriented APUs. Up until now, only Acer officially announced some Aspire 3 models with the new entry-level chips, but it looks like Lenovo is also jumping on the bandwagon, although without fanfare, as the IdeaPad 1 series appear now to feature Mendocino-powered variants.

NotebookItalia spotted the new IdeaPad 1 models on Lenovo’s Product Specifications Reference site. The spec sheets mention 14-inch and 15-inch variants powered by the Ryzen 5 7520U and Ryzen 3 7320U quad-core APUs, as well as the Athlon Gold 7220U and Athlon Silver 7120U dual-core processors. All these budget Mendocino chips integrate the Radeon 610M GPU with 2 CUs clocked at 1.9 GHz.

The Athlon models are obviously the least expensive and start out with only 4 GB of soldered LPDDR5-5500 RAM. However, the quad-core Ryzen configurations get 8 or even 16 GB of RAM. On the storage side, the Athlon models come with 128 GB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs, while the Ryzen models get the faster 512 GB PCIe 4.0 NVMe models. Users can expand the capacity through an SD card slot.

Strangely enough, Lenovo still offers 1366 x 768 TN screens for both 14-inch and 15-inch sizes, most likely for the Athlon configurations, so prices for these should not exceed a couple hundred USD. There are, of course, FHD IPS screens, as well as TN ones for the Ryzen configurations, but the color gamut is quite low and peak brightness is limited to 250 nits.

Depending on budget, the specs also include WiFi 5 or WiFi 6 with Bluetooth 5.0 / 5.1 connectivity and the port selection offers USB-C 3.2 Gen 1, USB-A 3.2 Gen 1, USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4b, and audio jack. While all models feature a 720p webcam with privacy shutter, only the more expensive Ryzen variants integrate a fingerprint reader with the power button.

To keep costs as low as possible, the chassis are mostly made of plastic and the 14-inch models weigh 3 lbs, whereas the 15-inch ones weigh 3.48 lbs. The included batteries may last for 14 hours in video playback mode.

Exact US$ prices are not yet available, but there are some Athlon Gold 7220U models with Hong Kong dollar prices that would convert to ~US$490 (most likely not matching the actual US prices).

Buy the Lenovo 15.6-inch IdeaPad 1 laptop with the AMD Athlon Silver 3050U processor on Amazon