AMD Brings Its Zen 3 Architecture, Up to Eight CPU Cores to Chromebooks

AMD has announced its bringing its newest 5000-series Zen 3 processors to the high-end Chromebook market. The company announced four CPUs that are Chromebook-bound; all are 15w parts. The big news is the top-shelf chip, the Ryzen 7 5825C, is an 8C/16T part, which is the highest core/thread count ever for a Chromebook. AMD is promising the new chips will bring more performance, longer battery life, and advanced features like Wi-Fi 6E to this budget notebook category.

The announcement is a long time coming. The company previously launched its 3000-series processors for Chromebooks back in 2020, so it’s been awhile. In AMD’s press release, the company says its newest CPUs can run circles around the 3000-series. That’s not a huge surprise, as the previous chips were based on the company’s Zen(+) architecture. Moving to Zen 3 is quite a leap.

At the top of the product stack is the aforementioned 8C/16T Ryzen 7 5825C. It sports a 2GHz base clock and a max boost of 4.5GHz on a single core. It’s sporting a Radeon Vega iGPU with eight cores running at 1.8GHz. Compared to the previous generation Chromebook Ryzen flagship CPU, the 4C/8T Ryzen 7 3700C, AMD says it’s twice as fast in Geekbench 5 multitasking. In the same comparison, the newer CPU is 67 percent faster in web browsing performance as well, according to AMD.

The Ryzen 5 5625C is the hexa-core Chromebook chip, with a 6C/12T configuration. It has a higher base clock than the chip above it at 2.3GHz, but a lower boost clock of 4.3GHz. It also has one less Radeon Vega CPU core with a total of seven.

The 4C/8T part is the Ryzen 3 5425C, which is configured similarly to the chip above it. E.G. a higher base clock of 2.7GHz and a boost clock of just 4.1GHz. It also has six Vega GPU cores, which is one less than the model above but three more than the final chip in the stack. The last one is the Ryzen 5125C, which is a 2C/4T CPU part that seems to run at 3GHz all the time. Its base and boost clocks are the same, and it has only three GPU cores.

AMD is claiming one of the biggest benefits its newest CPUs bring to the platform is improved battery life. According to the release, it’s claiming its six-core chip provides 94 percent more battery life than Intel’s Core i5-1135G7 CPU. For reference the Intel part is a 4C/8T Tiger Lake chip, so AMD is claiming despite offering more cores, it can still almost double battery life. AMD claims every CPU in this family provides “all-day” battery life, which it says is at least eight hours.

When it comes to launch models, AMD says major OEM partners across several verticals will offer Chromebooks with its newest processors. For now though, only two are in the pipeline: one from HP and one from Acer. The HP model is the Elite c645 G2 Chromebook Enterprise and it should arrive in June. It’ll offer a 14″ 1080p touchscreen display and up to 512GB of PCIe SSD storage along with 16GB of LPDDR4X memory. The Acer model is the Chroembook Spin 514, which is a 2-in-1 convertible with a gorilla glass touchscreen. It offers military-grade MIL-STD 810 durability and up to 256GB of PCIe storage. It’ll be arriving in Q3. Pricing for both models is TBD as of press time.

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