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With a huge selection of current Chromebooks available and the wide array of processors to choose from
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you'd be forgiven for forgetting about AMD's more recent Ryzen 5000U processors
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But we haven't. As a matter of fact, I check the Chromium repositories pretty often
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to see if the handful of Chromebooks we've been tracking for months at this point with this chipset inside are actually getting any closer to release
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And while I've not found concrete evidence of a release date, the amount of development that has continued to happen with this chip in those repositories
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has always made me hopeful we'll eventually see Chromebooks with these chips inside at some point
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Turns out I was right. And one of these Chromebooks has actually landed in our office from an anonymous source
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and we've taken it for a quick spin. So a little background is in order here
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AMD processors have been in Chromebooks for a few years at this point
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We originally got a handful of A4 and A6 powered devices back in early 2019
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but they were less than impressive. They were affordable, pretty slow, and compared to Intel's
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offerings at the time they just didn really stack up In early 2021 we began seeing the next wave of AMD processors the Ryzen 3000 series show up in Chromebooks like the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Now this set of processors was far faster than the AMD chips we had prior
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and when plugged in, they pushed into Intel's performance territory. But note the fact that I said, when plugged in
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The issue for all the last-gen AMD Chromebooks came down to a limitation
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inherent to the processors themselves, throttling. When not on a charger, the Ryzen chips we had in that last iteration of AMD Chromebooks
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would drop performance by almost 40%, and there was just no fixing it
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We checked a couple of weeks ago, actually, to see if this had been mitigated in any way
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and it just hasn't. When they're not plugged in, Chromebooks with this AMD chipset inside struggle to perform
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In November of 2020, however, a glimmer of hope for AMD-powered Chromebooks showed up
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in the form of the just-announced Ryzen 5000U series. Not only was this new chipset announced in general
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we actually began seeing it show up right away in the Chromium repositories in a few different baseboards
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Based on the initial announcement of these new chips, hopes ran pretty high that we might finally get flagship-level performance out of AMD Chromebooks
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And the built GPUs that come along with them were pretty exciting too And then we waited And waited And here in April of 2022 we had zero concrete evidence that any Chromebooks bearing these newer AMD chips would actually ever surface
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Well, that was until this one showed up. Now, we can't say where it came from or even what brand it is
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And we're not really going to show you the device either since it's super pre-production
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What we can share, however, are some specs and some benchmarks and the fact that we have a working device in our hands right now with an AMD Ryzen 5000U processor inside
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Regardless of the qualities of this particular device, the fact that we have a development unit out in the wild means that the Ryzen 5000U Chromebooks aren't dead
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They're alive and well, and they're fast. Now, looking at a couple benchmarks, you can see pretty quickly that these new AMD processors are legit
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With Octane scores near 70,000, speedometer scores just over 200, and MotionMark scores around 980
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there's no doubt this set of processors will perform when they show up in the market
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Now, to be fair, the one we have here is the top-end Ryzen 5 5800U with 16 gigs of RAM and a half terabyte of storage
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So this is the best of the best when it comes to AMD latest but that okay When the processor inside scores and feels the way this one does that perfectly fine And the best part is the fact that the throttling looks to be a thing of the past at least so far I tested this chip both on a charge and off and there was barely any
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drop-off in performance when I unplugged it from the wall. With stuff like parallels, Linux apps
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and Steam gaming all here or on the way, devices like these will be great for heavy processing tasks
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like gaming or video editing in the future. More importantly, it gives us another true contender
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in the Chromebook space from a processor standpoint. With flagship chips coming from Qualcomm, MediaTek
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and of course, Intel showing up in the next few months, AMD needed to show up and show out
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to win some of that Chrome OS market back. With these latest processors performing this well
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I think they're on the right path. But guys, that's it for this one. If you like this video, give us a thumbs up
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