Upcoming Chromebooks with AMD’s Powerful Ryzen Zen 3 Chipset Could Cause More Problems for Intel



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It’s a well-known fact that AMD has had an impressive year with its Ryzen processor series. With its 7-nanometer process, the company has made significant progress in performance over Intel’s offerings, attracting the attention of several manufacturers. With the imminent launch of the Ryzen 5000 and 5000U series, it was natural for Google to start developing a benchmark card designed around the new chipset, paving the way for flagship performance in Chromebooks.

As recently spotted in Chromium Gerrit, the new baseboards, called Guybrush, Mancomb, and Majolica, are three unibuild devices for Chromebooks that will likely be powered by AMD’s upcoming Zen 3 Cezanne chipset. We don’t know the full specifications of the APUs yet, but based on the leaked information compiled by ExecutableFix, there are three Ryzen 5000 U-series chips based on Cezanne. Here’s a quick rundown.

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A board from AMD’s Ryzen 5000U series in development. | HotHardware

The Ryzen 54000U, 5600U, and 5800U have configurable TDPs ranging from 10 watts to 25 watts. The Ryzen 7 5800U packs a punch, featuring an incredible 8-core / 16-thread design with a 2 GHz base clock and 4.4 GHz boost clock. Zen 3 generally delivers stunning performance with single and multi-threaded apps while adding around 19% CPI on Zen 2. Based on the Chromium commitments that point to benchmark cards using Cezanne, I strongly believe Google is planning to develop a powerful Chromebook board using AMD’s Zen 3 chips.

Not much else is known about Majolica, Guybrush, and Mancomb, given that they have just started development. However, we do know that all three cards have nearly identical configuration files on Gerrit, which suggests that they are very similar. Although their overlay files are barebones, I discovered that all three baseboards have the USE = “$ {USE} touchview” flag in their make.defaults files, indicating that they are able to switch to tablet mode. If I had to guess, I think these units are convertible AMD devices, as it seems unlikely to cram an 8-core processor into a tablet.

I think bringing AMD’s mighty Ryzen chips to Chromebooks is the right game. With Intel’s CPU supply difficulties and the inability to bring a 7-nanometer process to market, it makes sense for AMD to level the playing field and take Intel’s share of the Chromebook market. As Linux apps become more popular with heavy users, Chrome OS is evolving beyond the “simple browser,” and delivering powerful specs in a Chromebook will make the platform more appealing to a wider audience. AMD’s Zen 3 Cezanne chipset could represent a great opportunity for Chromebook makers looking to deliver high-end performance in their upcoming products. I will continue to look for upcoming changes to Majolica, Guybrush, and Mancomb and update this article if I discover more.

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