Until 2019, there was no such thing as an AMD Chromebook, believe it or not. Also, the original ones were sluggish, and while AMD’s second attempt at Chromebooks was far superior, they still used rebranded CPUs with Zen cores that were years out of date. AMD is now putting its best foot forward with the new Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors, which include the “first 8-core high-performance x86 processor for Chromebooks.”
AMD is still not putting its best foot forward, as these APUs will utilize last-generation AMD Vega graphics rather than the latest RDNA 2 technology seen in the company’s Ryzen 6000 CPUs (not to mention the PS5, Xbox Series X, and Steam Deck). And the new Ryzen 7 5825C, Ryzen 5 5625C, and Ryzen 3 5425C aren’t trying to conceal the fact that they’re mainly rebranded versions of the company’s U-series CPUs.
The big news here is that AMD’s Chromebook chips are no longer trapped on the previous Zen architecture – they’ve jumped all the way up to Zen 3, which AMD claims means up to twice the performance of its 3000-series chips in synthetic benchmarks, depending on the workload.
The business is also claiming that its processors outperform Intel processors in terms of performance and battery life, although the comparisons are hazy, to say the least. When you consider how much additional headroom the Intel chip can use, it’s impressive to read that AMD’s Ryzen 7 5825C, with a 15W TDP, is even 7% faster than Intel’s 28W i7-1185G7 in web browsing.
However, this is in comparison to an 11th Generation Intel CPU, not Intel’s newer 12th Generation processors, which should be making their way into Chromebooks as well.
When AMD claims that its 15W Ryzen 5 5625C has nearly double the battery life of Intel’s 28W i5-1135G7, it’s hard to be surprised, given that the Intel chip has nearly double the TDP as well. There’s a reason why a list of Chromebooks with the longest battery life includes 15W Intel CPUs rather than 28W Intel processors.
Still, there’s no doubt that this is significant for AMD, which has struggled for years to develop laptop chips worth buying and has only recently begun to succeed. So far, it has two wins for these new Chromebook chips: the 14-inch HP Elite C645 G2 Chromebook, which is geared at enterprises and has features like SmartCard and fingerprint sensors, and the 14-inch Acer Chromebook Spin 514.
