Much-improved benchmark scores hint flagship AMD Chromebooks could be here soon

It’s no secret that we’ve been waiting an awfully long time for AMD-powered Chromebooks to show up. Sure, we got a little nibble about a year and a half ago when the low-powered, cost-effective A4 and A6 devices showed up, but that’s not what we’re really after. We’re way more excited by the far-more-powerful Ryzen chips that PCs and laptops running Windows get to take advantage of. AMD’s lower prices and similar performance are a great fit for Chrome OS when compared to Intel, but the path has been long as we’ve waited for these Chromebooks to arrive.

I just came across a new benchmark from yesterday (August 31st 2020) over on Geekbench that tells me we may not be waiting much longer for these devices to finally show up. You see, back when the original benchmarks showed up for the full-powered AMD Chromebooks, the multi-core scores didn’t look so hot. With most of the current-gen Intel Chromebooks like the Acer Chromebook Spin 713, single-core scores are in the 4000-5000 range and the multi-core scores fall in the 13,000-14,000 range. When the AMD-powered ‘Trembyle’ device showed up in April over on Geekbench, the single-core scores checked out, but the multi-core score was a fraction of what we’d expect from a true Intel competitor at only 7000-8000. It didn’t look good.

Fast forward to this latest benchmark, however, and things are looking far, far better. With a current score of 4059 on single-core and 13303 on multi-core, ‘Trembyle’ (based on the ‘Zork’ unibuild) looks way more competitive with the current crop of higher-end Chromebooks. This is more in line with what we expect of the Ryzen 3700C processor that will ship in many of these AMD Chromebooks whenever they do show up. Keep in mind, these Chromebooks will also come equipped with Radeon Vega Mobile GPU as well, giving them a graphic leg-up on basically anything else on the market until Tiger Lake Chromebooks start showing up later this year and early in 2021 with Intel’s new Xe integrated GPUs.

With these increased scores comes an increased expectation that we’ll begin seeing Chromebooks with AMD chips inside sooner than later. It seems the kinks are getting ironed out for these chipsets and perhaps we’re finally getting closer to seeing what a Chromebook with an AMD processor and GPU can really do. It is a general trend to see Chromebook benchmarks get better as they approach an actual public launch, so these score increases likely mean we’re getting much, much closer to seeing a manufacturer announce an AMD-powered Chromebook. I certainly hope so.

Shop Best Chromebooks of 2020 So Far on Chrome Shop