The very first Google Chromebook bearing an AMD processor has been in the works for a while now, and it seems that the machine, codenamed Kahlee, will be getting an upgrade to AMD’s new Raven Ridge chipset platform before it’s released. Recent commits in the Chrome OS codebase analyzed by Chrome Unboxed have revealed, in no uncertain terms, that there is mention of Kahlee rocking a Raven Ridge chipset. Previous codebase mentions of Kahlee had painted it as being based on AMD’s Stony Ridge APU. This move to Raven Ridge puts Kahlee in a bit of a higher class, with previous Raven Ridge hardware in the laptop space having power roughly to scale with the recent AMD Ryzen architecture that has been giving Intel a pretty fair fight in the desktop market lately.
An upgrade to Ryzen-level power will make Kahlee a formidable beast indeed when it finally hits, far outclassing anything that the ARM-based set has to offer. As far as AMD’s biggest rival, Intel, the company is already working hard on getting its Cannon Lake chipsets into Chromebooks. Cannon Lake is a die shrink of the seventh-generation Kaby Lake, which will offer decreased power usage and heat, allowing better sustained performance and battery life compared to Kaby Lake. Since Ryzen is about on par with Kaby Lake in most regards outside of graphics, expect to see this Chromebook make some heavy optimizations, and perhaps take advantage of its extra graphical oomph in some way. As Chrome Unboxed mentions, the ability to run Linux applications through Crostini will likely shine here, and there is no doubt that the upcoming Chromebook will be able to handle most any Android game with aplomb on the highest settings, though NVIDIA’s SHIELD-exclusive games and ports that take advantage of its extremely powerful Tegra chips are probably not on the menu.
The codebase entries for Kahlee start in 2017, and this change over to Raven Ridge means that at least some of the development cycle that’s been done so far will have to be either ported, optimized, or redone from the ground up. This likely means that Kahlee won’t be hitting store shelves in the near future, but expecting it some time before the end of this year is far from unreasonable at this point.