AMD is still in the mix as new Ryzen 6000 Chromebooks begin development

You’d be forgiven for forgetting that there are more AMD-powered Chromebooks on the way at some point in the future. Thus far, AMD Chromebooks haven’t really caught on and have continually been eclipsed by devices with silicon from Intel, MediaTek, and Qualcomm on the inside. It’s not that AMD Chromebooks have been bad; it’s just that they’ve never had one that was truly great.

That all could change with the next wave of AMD Chromebooks that should arrive with the more-powerful AMD Ryzen 6000 on the inside. We haven’t had many Ryzen 5000 devices in the office as they’ve been routinely hard to find and get our hands on, but the ones we did test were fast and responsive for sure. Looking back, I’m not completely sure why the Ryzen 5000 Chromebooks never really took off apart from the move to start developing Ryzen 6000 devices instead. Across the board, it’s been a rather strange journey for AMD-powered Chromebooks, for sure.

While we don’t know exactly how fast these newer devices will be, it stands to reason from their Windows counterparts that Chromebooks built on the AMD Ryzen 6000 SoC will have plenty of power under the hood for general tasks, video editing, and gaming as well. We talked about this back in September when the first Ryzen 6000 devices began showing up in the Chromium Repositories, so you can read all about the power gains over the existing Ryzen 5000 chips in that post if you want more info. TL;DR – these Chromebooks will be very powerful.

New entries: ‘Markarth’ and ‘Frostflow’

Adding to the ‘Skyrim’ development board and the already-known ‘Morthal’ board we found back in late 2022, we now have two more AMD Ryzen 6000 Chromebooks on the way with ‘Markarth’ and ‘Frostflow’ – names taken from the Elder Scrolls games. Both of these devices are leveraging quite a bit from already-established changes in the Chromium Repositories, so it’s tough to get a pulse on what we expect from them at this point apart from the fact that they’ll come with newer, faster AMD silicon on board.

For now, it’s just encouraging to see AMD Chromebooks continuing to move forward. While the latest Intel silicon is doing great things in the ChromeOS world, Intel needs competition at the high end and AMD has the ability to provide that. While I’m clearly excited and rooting for some of the upcoming ARM-powered Chromebook tablets, AMD still has the chops to power some fantastic Chromebooks if they can get them to market in a reasonable amount of time. If not, I fear we’ll get new Ryzen 6000 Chromebooks that are priced too high and simply don’t do enough to differentiate from their Intel-powered counterparts. Hopefully that won’t be the case this time around.