After unveiling Athlon 3000-series of 15W mobile processors earlier this year, AMD has now announced Chromebook-optimized mobile processors with AMD Ryzen and Athlon 3000 C-Series family.
Designed in collaboration with Google, the new AMD mobile “Zen” processors deliver up to 178% faster web browsing and 212% better performance for multitasking and content creation compare to the previous generation AMD A6-9220C powered Chromebooks.
There are currently five 15W Ryzen/Athlon 3000 C-Series processors for Chromebooks.
Model | Cores / Threads | Boost/Base freq. | GPU Cores | Cache |
---|---|---|---|---|
AMD Ryzen 7 3700C | 4C/8T | Up to 4.0 / 2.3 GHz | 10 | 6MB |
AMD Ryzen 5 3500C | 4C/8T | Up to 3.7 / 2.1 GHz | 8 | 6MB |
AMD Ryzen 3 3250C | 2C/4T | Up to 3.5 / 2.6 GHz | 3 | 5MB |
AMD Athlon Gold 3150C | 2C/4T | Up to 3.3 / 2.4 GHz | 3 | 5MB |
AMD Athlon Silver 3050C | 2C/2T | Up to 3.2 / 2.3 GHz | 2 | 5MB |
AMD also reported other performance metrics around with AMD Ryzen 7 3700C Mobile Processor offering up to 251% better graphics performance, up to 104% faster office productivity performance, and up to 152% better photo editing performance compared to AMD A6-9220C powered Chromebooks. The performance delta looks impressive on paper, especially AMD A6-9220C was unveiled less than two years ago until you realize A6 is a 6W processor, while the new processors are listed with 15W TDP.
AMD 3000 C-Series Chromebooks are expected in Q4 202 from Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo, and others. More details may be found on the press release and product page.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
So this means that the previous CPUs were more efficient then, if they achieve 50-60% of the new one’s performance using only 40% of their power usage. Of couse when you factor every power-eating device in a laptop, it may happen that the whole new laptop completes a task using less energy (race to halt), but that remains to be verified.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-3-3250c
Only the 3500C and 3700C are based on 12nm Zen+. The other three are 14nm Zen/Dali.
Along with the Excavator-based A6-9220C and A4-9120C at the lower 6W TDP, this is a lot of Chromebook SKUs. Watch Chromebooks with the top two get priced above Ryzen 5 4500U systems or something stupid like that.
These laptops have no chance of running Linux?