Chromebooks get new AMD Ryzen 7020 chips with performance and battery gains

Ben Schoon | May 23 2023 - 7:55 am PT

While most Chromebooks today either ship with Intel or MediaTek chipsets, AMD has been offering its Ryzen and Athlon chips for a couple of years now. Today, AMD is launching a new batch of Ryzen and Athlon 7020 chips for Chromebooks with boosts all around.

Set to appear in Chromebooks very soon, AMD Ryzen 7020 C-Series and Athlon 7020 C-Series chips promise better battery life, better performance, and also bring RDNA 2 graphics to ChromeOS laptops. The chips are built on a 6nm process using AMD’s Zen 2 architecture and can deliver upwards of 17 hours of battery life, depending on the chip.

There will be four chips available in total – two Ryzen and two Athlon.

For higher-end Chromebooks, the AMD Ryzen 3 7320C and Ryzen 5 7520C are quad-core, 8-thread chips that can hit 4.1GHz and 4.3GHz respectively. On the more affordable side of things, the AMD Athlon Gold 7220C is a dual-core, 4-thread chip that hits up to 3.7GHz. The AMD Athlon Silver 7120C has two cores and two threads, and can hit 3.5GHz.

All of these chips have integrated graphics from the AMD Radeon 610M which supports AMD’s RDNA 2 graphics.

AMD claims that its new Ryzen 3 for Chromebooks can hit 17 hours of battery life and brings 1.6x better performance compared to the prior generation. The new Athlon Silver generation brings 1.8x better performance, and up to 19.5 hours of battery life. The updated chips also support Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, powering up to three 4K displays, and LPDDR5 memory.

AMD Ryzen and Athlon 7020 C-Series processors will land in Chromebooks from Asus and Dell starting in Q2 2023, which ends on June 30. Asus has already confirmed the new chips will be used in its Chromebook CM34 Flip.