Nearly two years since the arrival of the first AMD-based Chromebook to the Chromium Gerrit, three new variants of the ‘Grunt’ mainboard have now appeared in the commits centered around the company’s chipsets. There isn’t much more to go on at this point besides the new models of the said board, code-named ‘Liara,’ ‘Aleena,’ and ‘Careena.’ Each of those effectively represents the creation of a new branch for the Grunt. That places all three in the very early development phases, meaning it will likely be some time before any makes its way to the consumer market.
In the meantime, news surrounding AMD-powered Chrome OS devices has been circulating for quite some time but none has appeared as a final product yet. That means that any of these devices could be the very first Chrome laptop to be powered by AMD instead of Intel, ARM, or a Snapdragon SoC. It is also known that Grunt is closely related to another board that’s been seen under the codename ‘Kahlee.’ That’s been making the rounds with new updates since earlier this year. Most recently, the chipset in that board was updated from AMD’s Stony Ridge APU to the chipmaker’s Raven Ridge chips. Those can be compared to the company’s Ryzen architecture since they are built on the same Zen architecture. That means the three Chromebooks in question will be relatively powerful on the CPU side and backed by built-in Radeon Vega Graphics on the GPU side. At very least, these Chromebooks should be on par with Intel’s Chrome OS offerings for most tasks and could be even better in some cases.
Moreover, AMD chipsets will arguably be better for running Linux apps since the company has always placed a more direct emphasis on multi-thread performance than its competitors – which tend to have a single-thread performance focus. That should make them well suited for the enterprise market or education sector. At the same time, they should also be great for the average consumer and capable of running the most intensive apps or games on the Google Play Store with no problems. So there is a chance that AMD Chromebooks could land in a position to steal away a good portion of the market if and when these devices finally do launch.
