The Zen Of Chrome; Ryzen and Athlon 3000 C-Series For Chromebooks

Watch For Zen Powered Chromebooks From Acer, ASUS, HP And Lenovo In Q4

Today AMD announced the impending arrival of new processors specifically designed for ultramobile Chromebooks, in partnership with Google.  AMD added new Zen connectivity features like Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 and significantly increased battery life.   The PR offers a variety of comparative benchmarks which you should take with a grain of salt or five, but the numbers are big enough that there will be an obvious difference in all usage.

The top of the line Ryzen 7 3700C is compared against the previous generation of AMD Chromebooks, in the case of graphics performance against a system running on an AMD A6-9220C.  In that scenario they report a 251% performance increase in the 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme Open GL benchmark, a boost high enough that AMD deserves to be proud of the boost.  In an office productivity test they reported a 104% boost and in photo editing a 152% boost from the previous generation.  Even if you can’t expect to see those numbers in every application they are large enough that you should see improvements across the board.

As you can see in the chart above, all the Ryzen C Series processors are multi-threaded and with GPU cores ranging from three at 1200MHz  in the Ryzen 3 3250C up to an impressive 10 1400MHz cores in the Ryzen 7 3700C.  The CPUs all manage to operate at 15W and unlike Intel’s Tiger Lake they do not seem be able to run at a higher wattage.

The Athlons are split between the multithreaded Gold 3150C and the single threaded Silver 3050C, which also happen to run at 15W.  The Gold has three Radeon cores at 1100MHz while the Silver makes do with a pair of Radeon cores at the same frequency. So far we haven’t seen the Chromebooks in their entirety but it is very nice to know there will be quite a few different AMD powered Chromeboooks!