Early 2019 AMD announced his first offer of microprocessors intended for Chromebook, laptops based on Google Chrome OS. These devices find particularly fertile ground in the US school environment and represent a low-cost solution for those who work / study mainly online.
Last year AMD unveiled the A6-9220C and A4-9120C processors, dual-core solutions with 6-watt TDP and a Radeon R4 (GCN) GPU with 3 Compute Units (128 stream processors) to compete with the Celeron N3350 and Pentium solutions Intel's N4200. It was APU Bristol Ridge, based on architecture Excavator (from pre-Zen era, AMD FX) and made at 28 nanometers.
However, this year AMD seems to have in store something more advanced. In the Geekbench database, as reported by Notebookcheck, references have indeed appeared to a Chromebook called Google Zork (probably a new 2 in 1) with processors Ryzen 3 3250C and Ryzen 7 3700C. At the moment there are no references on a Ryzen 5 model, but its existence cannot be excluded, also because the Ryzen 3 chip offers 2 cores / 4 threads at 2.6 GHz, while the Ryzen 7 has 4 cores / 8 threads at 2.3 GHz. There is potentially room for a Ryzen 5 with four cores and disabled SMT or another configuration capable of offering intermediate performance.
Either way it is APU with a 15 watt TDP and according to rumors it could be simple adaptations of U models intended for the mobile sector, based on the number of cores, TDP and identical frequencies. If so, the Ryzen 3 model would have to be based on 14 nanometer Zen architecture, while the Ryzen 7 would be based on 12 nanometer Zen + architecture. However, the information is so scarce at the moment that it is better to take these last details with the pliers, as they refer to the U models.
In any case, this year – perhaps soon, at the moment we have no details – we should see the arrival of new Chromebooks with AMD chips designed to compete with the proposals equipped with Intel Core processors of the tenth generation.
