AMD Introduces A4 and A6 Processors for Chromebooks from HP and Acer

AMD announced two new processors specifically for Chromebooks at CES. HP and Acer will present new Chromebooks based on the A4 and A6 processors at CES.

These are dual-core processors, which are still baked at 28nm, but according to AMD are faster in every way than Intel’s Pentium and Celeron processors. AMD has been building processors using the 28nm process since 2014, but has switched to 14 and later 12nm for its Ryzen processors. The new A4 and A6 processors should suffice for Chrome OS, which generally does not have too much of a processor load. The dual-core CPUs both have a TDP of 6 watts and are equipped with a GPU based on the GCN 1.2 architecture. AMD first uses that architecture in its Carrizo APUs in 2015.

Despite the outdated architecture, the A4 is faster than the Intel Celeron N3350, according to AMD, while the A6 processor is faster than a Pentium N4200 processor. Like the AMD CPUs, the Intel processors mentioned have a TDP rating of 6 watts and are widely used in Chromebooks. In addition, the Pentium N4200 has a quad-core CPU, while the N3350 has two cores, just like both AMD processors. The benchmarks run by AMD are some tests from PCMark 10 and WebXprt, in which the AMD CPUs were equipped with two 4GB DDR4 modules. It is not stated which memory configuration was used for the Intel CPUs.

HP uses the AMD A4 processor in the Chromebook 14, also presented at CES, and Acer will also use the processors in its new Chromebooks.