AMD has announced four new (well, sort of) processors being marketed for Chromebooks: the Ryzen and Athlon 7020C series.
The release includes two Ryzen processors (a Ryzen 5 7520C and a Ryzen 3 7320C) with four cores, eight threads and 15W TDP, with AMD Radeon 610M graphics. The Ryzen 3 has a 2.4 GHz base with a boost frequency of up to 4.1 GHz, while the Ryzen 5 has a slightly higher 2.8 GHz and 4.3 GHz respectively.
The Athlon Silver 7120C and Athlon Gold 7220C both have two cores and two and four threads respectively. Both have a base frequency of 2.4 GHz; the Silver increases to 3.5 GHz, the Gold to 3.7.
As is often the case with these Chromebook-specific CPU releases from AMD, “new” is a bit of a misleading term. The 7020C series is built on the company’s Zen 2 architecture, which has been around since the good old days of 2019.
If you compare the specs, these are basically the same chips that AMD released last September to target budget Windows laptops. In the past, AMD’s justification for doing this kind of rebranding has been that Chromebook-branded processors better help people find Chromebooks that fit their computing needs. Anyway, potential buyers should note that there is nothing particularly new about these chips.
Nevertheless, AMD makes big promises for the C-series. For example, the company claims that the 7320C delivers “1.6 times higher average performance under tested workloads” than previous generations of Ryzen-powered Chromebooks, as well as “up to 3.5 hours longer battery life” than competing MediaTek (Kompanio 1380) and Intel (Core i3 -N305) systems. According to AMD, users can expect up to 19.5 hours of battery life on the Athlon Silver and up to 17 hours on the Ryzen 3. AMD appears to have tested these using the CrXPRT synthetic benchmark, which may or may not reflect your own reality. world use. (It’s safe to say that 19 hours would be an incredibly long lifespan in the real world.)
“We are impressed with the combination of raw power and efficiency that AMD has brought to several Chromebooks,” John Solomon, vice president and general manager of ChromeOS, said in a statement. “We are pleased that AMD’s 7020 C-series processors continue that excellent track record.”