AMD Brings Zen 2 to 6nm Process With New Ryzen, Athlon Chromebook Chips
AMD promises better performance than Intel and Arm.
AMD today announced its new series of Ryzen and Athlon 7020C chips, porting its Zen 2 architecture to a 6-nanometer process specifically for Chromebooks. AMD says its next set of chips focuses on laptops priced between $300 and $500.
AMD suggests its new processors will allow up to 19.5 hours of battery life on upcoming laptops. The company says the Athlon chips are being used to target the education market, while the Ryzen lineup is meant for mainstream business and consumer Chromebooks.
Header Cell - Column 0 | AMD Athlon Silver 7120C | AMD Athlon Gold 7220C | AMD Ryzen 3 7320C | AMD Ryzen 5 7520C |
---|---|---|---|---|
Cores / Threads | 2/2 | 2/4 | 4/8 | 4/8 |
Base clock | 2.4 GHz | 2.4 GHz | 2.4 GHz | 2.8 GHz |
Boost clock | Up to 3.5 GHz | Up to 3.7 GHz | Up to 4.1 GHz | Up to 4.3 GHz |
Cache | 3MB | 5MB | 6MB | 6MB |
TDP | 15W | 15W | 15W | 15W |
Integrated graphics | Radeon 610M | Radeon 610M | Radeon 610M | Radeon 610M |
There are two Athlons, the Silver 7120C and Athlon Gold 7220C. The Silver has two cores and two threads, while the Gold doubles the thread count. Both start at 2.4 GHz, but the Athlon Gold boosts up to 3.7 GHz and has 5MB cache, while the Silver boosts up to 3.5 GHz and has 3MB of cache.
Both Ryzen options offer four cores, eight threads, and 6MB of cache. The Ryzen 3 starts at 2.4 GHz and boosts up to 4.1 GHz, while the Ryzen 5 begins at 2.8 GHz and boosts up to 4.3 GHz. The entire lineup has a 15W TDP and uses integrated Radon 610M graphics based on RDNA 2.
In its own benchmarks, AMD compared its Ryzen 3 7320C to a Ryzen 3 3250C, its previous Zen 2 processor. Note that AMD skipped its Ryzen 5000C series, which used Zen 3 (and also had more cache). The Zen 3-based AMD Ryzen 3 5425C would have been comparable, but the company chose not to use that. AMD claims the 7320C in a Dell Latitude Chromebook 3445 is 28% better than the 3250C (in an Asus Chromebook Flip CM5) on Geekbench 5 single-core, 135% better on multi-core, 46% better on the Kraken Javascript benchmark, along with several other improvements in the slide below. AMD is also claiming a 60% battery improvement at 17.1 hours.
AMD also compares the Ryzen 3 7320C to the MediaTek Kompanio 1380 in an Acer Chromebook Spin 513. Here, AMD claims its chip is 15% faster in Geekbench multi-core and 16% faster in single-core, as well as 20% faster on the Octane 2.0 browser benchmark. In addition, AMD alleges 28% extra battery life over the Kompanio.
Lastly, AMD compared to an Intel Core i3-N305 (in an HP Chromebook MT7921), a 15W, 8-core, 8-thread chip on Intel 7 that Intel released earlier this year. Here, AMD says that it's on average 15% faster, including being 2% faster on PC Mark Video Editing, 7% faster on Kraken 1.1 and 42% faster on PCMark Photo Editing.
The new Ryzens and Athlons use RDNA 2-based Radon 610M and can hook up to three 4K monitors at 60 Hz. For connectivity, it uses Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2.
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AMD's partners are announcing new laptops powered by these chips today, including the Dell Latitude 3445 Chromebook and Asus Chromebook CM34 Flip (CM3401), with other designs coming from Acer and ECS, with Best Buy on board to sell them.
You can see the full slide deck, including testing notes, below.
Andrew E. Freedman is a senior editor at Tom's Hardware focusing on laptops, desktops and gaming. He also keeps up with the latest news. A lover of all things gaming and tech, his previous work has shown up in Tom's Guide, Laptop Mag, Kotaku, PCMag and Complex, among others. Follow him on Threads @FreedmanAE and Mastodon @FreedmanAE.mastodon.social.
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abufrejoval I hate to see AMD play Intel's game again.Reply
I can't believe for a second that the dual and quad core chips will be different dies. And likewise that the duals will be harvested dies with honest defects: TMSC at 6nm just isn't very likely to produce defects of sufficient magnitude on chips as small as this.
So good dies will be fused off and culled just like the Alder Lake N chips are all very likely fully functioning 8-core chips destroyed to yield 2 and 4 core variants to fit a niche that has no technical reason for its existence.
Zen was all about using the die real-estate that Intel gave away for free as iGPUs on their quad core chips (originally to kill off ATI and Nvidia chipsets with their iGPUs) to create an additional 4 cores at no extra cost and kick Intel where they had hurt them as ATI.
That was both genius and a fair return for Intel's anti-competitive behavior.
But of course it left them vulnerable to market segments, that didn't really need or appreciate core counts not multiples of 8... and without an entry level equivalent.
Perhaps a quad core APU is of sufficient interest for a stand-alone die. I certainly wouldn't mind "AMD Atoms". But I'd want them without Zen features fused off, e.g. ECC RAM and not culled to the point where their target will be e-waste after a single short generation of use.
Designing on a Zen 2 base probably only makes sense, because it's a quad core at its heart. I've never quite understood why Zen wasn't octa from the start unless quads were orignally planned and only eliminated later.
If it wasn't for that, using an older generation core for a die shrink would seem intentionally crippling a design for market segmentation, because the die area savings may not be enough to gain extra dies from a wafer: CPU cores cost so little area vs the I/O blocks an smaller geometries that I'd have to see the math to believe it. -
rluker5 Cherry picking again.Reply
Trying to make older, slower stuff look groundbreaking in efficiency.
There's older, slower stuff out there that make these chips look terrible at power consumption.
I'm going on vacation again soon and have connecting fights and am going with some old, cheap ebay tablets again. One runs the m-5y71 2c4t, up to 2.9 ghz at 6w tdp (from 2014) and the other runs an atom z3775 4c at 2w tdp (also from 2014) The atom is barely useable. It runs the web slowly but completely, Netflix and Youtube smoothly, music fine and maxes out playing Bioshock 1 and Oblivion at 720p low/~30. The m-5y71 seems like a normal pc. Plays Skyrim, FONV, ME2, etc at 720p low~30 for example and has a normal modern response time for light use.
Both are much slower than these much newer Ryzens, but user experience per watt for light use make the new chips look less than impressive. They're in old Dell Venue 11 pros btw. And there might be a bit of conflict on who is going to be using the newer one. I'll probably just make sure the atom gets plenty of books and music.
They should sell these on experience per $. They will be in new systems. Set the power limit for the slow things high enough to not throttle and give them good connectivity. Maybe sodimms and a decent amount of ports.
Price, not efficiency should be the selling point for repurposed old designs.