Work has begun on new, mysterious AMD SoCs for Chromebooks: ‘Morgana’ and ‘Glinda’

Though this time of year is usually a bit slow when it comes to new Chromebook development, we’re seeing a new SoC from AMD hit the repositories. Generally in Q4, it’s all about new hardware releases and deals on existing Chromebooks, but there are years when this time of year also sees the inclusion of new processors in the development cycle for the ChromeOS team. It looks like 2022 is one of those years.

According to a bit of work happening in the Chromium Repositories, it looks like a couple new AMD chipsets are being prepped for upcoming Chromebooks. We recently uncovered work being done on Ryzen 6000 chips for Chromebooks coming likely in 2023, but this is something different. The Ryzen 6000 chip coming to ChromeOS is code named ‘Yellow Carp’, so these ‘Morgana’ and ‘Glinda’ SoCs are different animals.

Little is known about these brand-new SoCs

As it turns out, there’s very little on the internet about either of these brand-new AMD SoCs. Perusing Google for more info, I found only reference to the addition of these SoC code names in Linux Coreboot via Phoronix. And there’s little info to be found about either SoC from Coreboot, other than the fact that these chips are likely destined for Chromebooks. Being in the Chromium Repositories affirms that, obviously, and there’s little else to glean from ‘Morgana’ or ‘Glinda’ at this point.

With Ryzen 5000 Chromebooks currently in the market and Ryzen 6000 devices already on the way, we don’t have any idea what these new SoCs could be. There’s nothing that points to ‘Morgana’ or ‘Glinda’ having anything to do with the Ryzen 7000 processors AMD announced back in late August as those chips were developed under the code names ‘Raphael’, ‘Dragon Range’ and ‘Phoenix’.

For the time being, all we can do is wait until more commits are added around these new AMD processors to try and find more details. They could be Chrombook-specific chips or something mid-range that AMD has yet to announce that will come to both Chromebooks and Windows devices. Details are so sparse at this point that we’d only be guessing. So, for now, we wait and we dig and we’ll report back when we have more to talk about.