AMD’s Ryzen, Athlon 7020-C Chips to Power Midrange Chromebooks

New AMD chips will power more mainstream Chromebooks in the $300 to $500 range. 

The Ryzen and Athlon 7020-C series chips can deliver up to 19.5 hours of battery life to a Chromebook, AMD says. Look for them in PCs from Dell and Asus in Q2.

The new silicon will arrive across four chips, which have been built with a 6-nanometer manufacturing process. The most powerful chip, the Ryzen 5 7520 C, features four CPU cores and eight threads running at up to 4.3GHz in boost speeds. All the processors also contain a built-in Radeon 610M GPU, which can support up to three 4K 60Hz external displays. 

(Credit: AMD)

“This line was designed to serve the wide range of markets for Chromebooks, from entry to mainstream, across consumer, education and business,” AMD marketing product manager Mike Jasinski said in a press briefing. 

The new chips arrive a year after AMD launched the Ryzen 5000 C-Series, which was designed for premium Chromebooks over $500. Although demand for Chromebooks has plummeted following historic highs during the COVID-19 pandemic, AMD is still bullish on the products, citing rising adoption of Chrome OS. 

The two Ryzen 7020 C-Series are meant for Chromebooks designed for consumers and business users. Meanwhile, the entry-level Athlon 7020 C-Series will target the “early education market,” offering chips that only feature two CPU cores. 

The chips promise to offer a performance boost over AMD’s Chrome-focused chips from 2020 and other competing processors from Intel and MediaTek. Depending on the app running, users can expect up to an 80% performance increase over Arm-based chips and an up to 15% improvement over Intel-based processors, Team Red says.  

(Credit: AMD)

At the same time, the new AMD chips can beat the competition in terms of battery life, thanks to the 6nm manufacturing process, Jasinski said. “Even with the competition using all efficiency cores in this space, they can’t match the battery life or performance that Ryzen delivers.”

(Credit: AMD)

Asus is already preparing to use the chips for the Asus Chromebook CM34 Flipbook convertible laptop. Dell, on the other hand, is packing the processors inside a business-focused Dell Latitude 3445 Chromebook. There’s no pricing at the moment, but users can expect Best Buy to sell both devices. Stay tuned for our reviews.

(Credit:AMD)