Even though there have been a few Chromebooks with AMD Ryzen processors, most are still using Intel or MediaTek chipsets, and CES 2022 came and went without any new Ryzen models. However, not only is a new high-end AMD Chromebook on the way, but it might be using the more recent Ryzen 5000 family of chips.

Chrome Unboxed reports that it has access to an upcoming Ryzen-powered Chromebook, thanks to "an anonymous source." The laptop shown off in the below video supposedly has a Ryzen 7 5800U processor, 16GB RAM, and 512GB of internal storage. It's described as a pre-production unit, and all brand markings are covered up. However, Chrome Unboxed did run a few benchmarks — Octane scores were near 70,000, Speedometer was just over 200, and MotionMark provided a rating of around 980.

\r\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Kn_OtyUDVg\r\n

The Ryzen 7 5800U is an 8-core and 16-thread chip, with a default TDP of 15W (though manufacturers can tune it to 10-25W) and a base clock of 1.9GHz. It was released in January 2021, so there are plenty of Windows laptops with the chip, like the Acer Swift X and Asus ZenBook 13 OLED.

Even though Chromebooks with Ryzen 7 5000 chipsets would seemingly have a decent performance boost over possible Intel-based competition, it's not all good news. AMD just released the Ryzen 6000 series of processors for laptops, based on the company's new 'Zen 3+' architecture. The chips support USB 4.0, DDR5-5200 and LPDDR5-6400 memory, and other features that improve performance and power efficiency. Even if the first wave of Ryzen 5000 Chromebooks arrives soon, they'll still be one step behind AMD's best laptop chips.

This news comes as Google is attempting to make the case for higher-end Chromebooks, mainly with the upcoming Steam for Chrome OS feature and improvements to the Linux container layer. Chromebook and tablet shipments are dropping worldwide, now that the rush to buy computers for working from home has largely ended.

Source: Chrome Unboxed