AMD’s highly renowned CPUs built on the company’s Zen architecture are expanding into Chromebooks. That’s according to the manufacturer itself, though the actual expansion will took at least another few weeks to begin.
The first wave of Chromebooks to utilize these processors will include devices from HP, Acer, Lenovo, and ASUS, AMD said, without commenting on any specifcs regarding any one of those consumer electronics giants. But based on modern precedent, it can be assumed that Lenovo and HP will have proportionally larger contributions to the first generation of Zen Chromebooks than the rest.
Of course, it is not too difficult to argue that Chrome OS is hardly a power-hungry platform, but an overreliance on cloud computing is starting to seem as an increasingly bad idea in consumer tech, both from a standpoint of privacy and cybersecurity. As for the announcement in front of us, the first-gen Zen Chromebooks still lack a release window more concrete than Q4 2020.
We do know that AMD has prepared no fewer than five specialized configurations of its Zen series, with the star of the show being the AMD Ryzen 7 3700C capable of operating at up to 4GHz and featuring a 6MB cache.
