AMD may be expanding into the Chromebook market

AMD seems to be going all-out this year try to reestablish themselves in a market long ceded to Intel. The desktop Ryzen 7 and 5-series CPUs have made modest impacts with their releases, and while no Ryzen-based mobile chips have been seen yet (these are slated for 2H 2017), it looks like AMD will be powering some Chromebooks sometime soon.

An AMD board codenamed "Jadeite" was spotted in the open-source Chromium repositories in December; another board was spotted in March. The March sighting, codenamed "Kahlee", has just been confirmed in a review of ChromeOS's Coreboot code by website Phoronix. The records found in Google's code show that this AMD-powered Chromebook will be based on a seventh generation Stoney Ridge APU (APUs are what AMD refers to their chips containing both CPUs and GPUs). Stoney Ridge is a budget, 15W dual core platform first released in 2016. This means that this will not be a cutting-edge device in terms of performance, but it is significant in that it shows AMD is again ramping up their market presence, and we should expect more mobile offerings from the Taiwanese company later this year.