AMD today announced its new series of Ryzen and Athlon 7020C chips, porting its Zen 2 architecture to a 6-nanometer process specifically for Chromebooks. AMD says its next set of chips focuses on laptops priced between $300 and $500.
AMD suggests its new processors will allow up to 19.5 hours of battery life on upcoming laptops. The company says the Athlon chips are being used to target the education market, while the Ryzen lineup is meant for mainstream business and consumer Chromebooks.
There are two Athlons, the Silver 7120C and Athlon Gold 7220C. The Silver has two cores and two threads, while the Gold doubles the thread count. Both start at 2.4 GHz, but the Athlon Gold boosts up to 3.7 GHz and has 5MB cache, while the Silver boosts up to 3.5 GHz and has 3MB of cache.
Both Ryzen options offer four cores, eight threads, and 6MB of cache. The Ryzen 3 starts at 2.4 GHz and boosts up to 4.1 GHz, while the Ryzen 5 begins at 2.8 GHz and boosts up to 4.3 GHz. The entire lineup has a 15W TDP and uses integrated Radon 610M graphics based on RDNA 2.
In its own benchmarks, AMD compared its Ryzen 3 7320C to a Ryzen 3 3250C, its previous Zen 2 processor. Note that AMD skipped its Ryzen 5000C series, which used Zen 3 (and also had more cache). The Zen 3-based AMD Ryzen 3 5425C would have been comparable, but the company chose not to use that. AMD claims the 7320C in a Dell Latitude Chromebook 3445 is 28% better than the 3250C (in an Asus Chromebook Flip CM5) on Geekbench 5 single-core, 135% better on multi-core, 46% better on the Kraken Javascript benchmark, along with several other improvements in the slide below. AMD is also claiming a 60% battery improvement at 17.1 hours.
AMD also compares the Ryzen 3 7320C to the MediaTek Kompanio 1380 in an Acer Chromebook Spin 513. Here, AMD claims its chip is 15% faster in Geekbench multi-core and 16% faster in single-core, as well as 20% faster on the Octane 2.0 browser benchmark. In addition, AMD alleges 28% extra battery life over the Kompanio.
Lastly, AMD compared to an Intel Core i3-N305 (in an HP Chromebook MT7921), a 15W, 8-core, 8-thread chip on Intel 7 that Intel released earlier this year. Here, AMD says that it's on average 15% faster, including being 2% faster on PC Mark Video Editing, 7% faster on Kraken 1.1 and 42% faster on PCMark Photo Editing.
The new Ryzens and Athlons use RDNA 2-based Radon 610M and can hook up to three 4K monitors at 60 Hz. For connectivity, it uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2.
AMD's partners are announcing new laptops powered by these chips today, including the Dell Latitude 3445 Chromebook and Asus Chromebook CM34 Flip (CM3401), with other designs coming from Acer and ECS, with Best Buy on board to sell them.
You can see the full slide deck, including testing notes, below.
