Aside from ARM chips inside Chromebooks, Intel has had a lock on the devices when it comes to x86 processors. That’s going to change, possibly this year, thanks to AMD getting in on the market. XDA-Developers found Chromium OS code referencing a device called “Kahlee”, which will run on an AMD Ridge Raven processor. Two additional AMD-powered devices are also in the works.
I’ve seen the Kahlee reference before but held off on mentioning it until I could gather more information. Today I found some, but it’s just a little more.
I anticipate the Kahlee Chromebook to be a low-cost device, not because of the AMD processor but due to the screen resolution which I found in the Chromium OS code: Kahlee will support a 1366 x 768 display. That screen resolution isn’t typically found in high- or even mid-range Chromebooks which tend to have 1920 x 1080 displays in the $400 and up price range. As a result, I’m taking an educated guess that Kahlee is meant for the sub-$400 market.
As far as the processor, AMD’s Raven Ridge mobile chips were announced and became available in January of this year. The lowest model — dubbed the RYZEN 3 2200U with Radeon Vega3 Graphics — is still pretty capable: 2 cores with a max clockspeed of 3.4GHz (as needed), 3 graphics compute units with a GPU clockspeed of 1.0GHz, and nominal TDP of 15W. Dell currently uses a variant of this chip to power its 17-inch Dell Inspiron 5000 series of laptops.
Note that at least one code commit as recently as April 19th swaps Kahlee out with the code name of Grunt. It’s possible that Grunt, which also supports a 1366 x 768 display resolution, is a separate board that will be used for the basis of a Chromebook or could be the same. My guess is that it’s separate.
