Chromebooks are more often than not considered the black sheep of the laptop scene, as they tend to be underpowered machines compared to their cousins running Windows. There are more and more powerful and premium Chromebooks in the market though these days, however few of them are running AMD powered chips. AMD wants to change that with the AMD Ryzen 5000C series of chips.
The AMD Ryzen 5000C finally brings the Zen 3 architecture available to Chromebooks, all built on the 7nm process with a 15W TDP. Starting on the top of the product stack is the AMD Ryzen 7 5825C, which packs 8 cores, 16 threads running at a 2.0GHz base frequency and a 4.5GHz boost clock. It also comes with integrated Vega 8 graphics and 20MB of cache. Below that is the Ryzen 5 5625C with 6 cores, 12 threads at 2.3GHz base and 4.3GHz boost speeds as well as Vega 7 integrated graphics.
Below that are two Ryzen 3 chips, with the Ryzen 3 5425C a 4 core, 8 thread processor running at 2.7GHz base and 4.1GHz boost and Vega 6 integrated graphics while the entry level Ryzen 3 5125C is a dual core, four thread chip running at 3.0Ghz with Vega 3 integrated graphics. Across the board, you are getting some reasonably high end features though, such as WiFi 6E support as well as fast charging capabilities.
As for the first devices to be getting these, HP and Acer are the first couple of manufacturers to confirm that they have Chromebooks with Ryzen 5000C processors under the hood. The Acer Chromebook Spin 514 2-in-1 is getting a refresh with up to an AMD Ryzen 5 5825C mated to up to 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to a 256GB SSD. It will however only launch later this year with a USD579.99 (~RM2,534.56) starting price for the model with a Ryzen 3 5125C, 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD.
HP meanwhile has the HP Elite c645 G2, which also starts with the Ryzen 3 5125C up till the Ryzen 7 5825C on the higher tier models, with up to 16GB of RAM and up to 512GB of SSD storage too. Just like the Acer though, it will only be made available later this year with a USD559 (~RM2,442.83) starting price.
