AMD today announced the Ryzen 5000 C-Series processors, which bring AMD’s Chromebook CPU family up to date with the Zen 3 architecture and 7nm technology. The names of the new CPUs have been shown on the image below. The four new 15W CPUs have up to eight x86 cores and the Radeon RX Vega graphics engine with up to eight GPU cores, which is a first for Chromebooks. Despite a performance priority for what have typically been low-power Chromebooks, AMD says that its chips give nearly twice the battery life of Intel’s Tiger Lake models.
AMD Ryzen 5000 C-Series with Zen 3 CPU Architecture announced:
| MODEL | CORES/ THREADS | TDP (Watts) | BOOSTv /BASEFREQ. (GHz) | GPU CORES | CACHE (MB) |
| AMD Ryzen™ 7 5825C | 8C/16T | 15W | Up to 4.5GHz/2.0GHz | 8 | 20 MB |
| AMD Ryzen™ 5 5625C | 6C/12T | 15W | Up to 4.3GHz/2.3GHz | 7 | 19 MB |
| AMD Ryzen™ 3 5425C | 4C/8T | 15W | Up to 4.1GHz/2.7GHz | 6 | 10 MB |
| AMD Ryzen™ 3 5125C | 2C/4T | 15W | Up to 3.0GHz/3.0GHz | 3 | 9MB |
The 5000 C-Series chips will address a new higher-tier class of Chromebooks with the most high-end features, such as premium screens and designs, while AMD’s existing 3000 C-Series chips will continue to address mainstream and entry-level tiers.
AMD’s initial entry into Chromebook-specific CPUs was in 2020 with the Ryzen and Athlon 3000 C-Series processors, which used the first-generation Zen architecture and a 14nm technology, thus the move to Zen 3 and 7nm signifies a significant improvement in terms of performance, power consumption, and efficiency.
Most of the 15W Ryzen 5000 C-series chips are rebranded copies of AMD’s existing mobile devices, in this case, the Ryzen 5000 U-series, with AMD’s rationale for the new branding being a clear separation of the Windows- and Chromebook-branded processors, as before.
The Chromebook-optimized variations and their U-series siblings have small clock rate variances, with 100 MHz higher CPU boost frequencies swapped for a 100 to 200 MHz reduction in peak GPU clock rates. The Ryzen 3 5125C, on the other hand, is an outlier, as there doesn’t appear to be a dual-core quad-thread counterpart in the existing Ryzen 5000 U-series portfolio.
AMD claims a 7% advantage in Webxprt 3, a 25% advantage in the threaded Geekbench 5 sub-test, and a 10% advantage in the Motion Mark benchmark when compared to the Intel i7-1185G7. When Intel’s Alder Lake-N arrives at an indeterminate date, we may expect this comparison to substantially shift. In the CrXPRT2 battery life benchmark, AMD claims the Ryzen 5 5525C gives up to 94 percent better battery life than the Intel i5-1135G7, which is significant for what has typically been a low-power category with generous battery life (CrXPRT is a Chromebook-specific benchmark from Principled Technologies).
Safe boot, AMD secure processor, and compatibility for Google’s TPM management are among the security features included in AMD’s Ryzen 5000 C-Series.
