Chromebook was reported to have a huge leap in its hardware upgrade as it is hinted to integrate an AMD CPU. Known that Chromebook’s hardware was previously made up of only either Intel or an ARM processor, using an AMD chip was considered to be Chromebook’s biggest milestone.
According to Tech Radar, the rumors pointed to the AMD Powered Chromebook to be codenamed under “Kahlee.” The new Chromebook was reported to be spotted in a Coreboot code review, which briefly gave its hardware information about the device.
The refined Chromebook was then speculated to incorporate AMD’s Stoney Ridge chipset than the recently released Ryzen chips. Furthermore, the reason for choosing Stoney Ridge was stated that AMD hasn’t yet prepped up its CPU Architecture of their Ryzen chips for Chromebooks. Another factor was said to be AMD Ryzen chip’s cost.
Other information regarding the Stoney Ridge hardware is that it uses a dual or quad-core 28nm processor. The expected new Chromebook chipset was also identified to use AMD's Excavator microarchitecture and sport a 3rd-generation Graphics Core Next AMD Radeon GPU. Aside from the Stoney Ridge chipset, the rumored Chromebook was seen to have two M.2 storage slots, one speculated for a wireless card while the other with a small SSD.
Android Headlines also reported that aside from the AMD powered Chromebook, there were also other several upgrades spotted by tech consumers. Codenamed “Nasher” was expected to be supported by Intel Apollo Lake processors while a mentioned “Birch“ would be a MediaTek supported touch screened Chromebook.
With that said, the Chromebook integrating AMD processors would now be able to support a “DDR4 memory of up to 2133 MHz, HDMI 2.0, PCIe Gen 3.0, and hardware accelerated H.265/HEVC and VP9 video decoding.” Hence, an AMD-powered Chromebook would cater users to engage in high graphic games and interface. Nonetheless, no release date and confirmation had been released.
