I believe that these chips were delayed due to the TSMC crunch that delayed some chips by over a year, and even then were only delivered in small numbers. I really don’t think that it is a stopgap. If the refurbished condition scares you, the old Acer Chromebook 713 with Intel Core i5 can still be found for $539, brand new. You could pick up an Amazon refurbished Acer Chromebook 713 with 11th gen Intel Core i5 with the same 8 GB of memory and double the storage for $519.00? It was my pick for Chromebook of the year in 2020. Image courtesy of Chrome UnboxedĪrmed with that info, from a performance standpoint, I’m wondering why any significant number of buyers would drop $549 on this. And in the case of this new AMD Ryzen Chromebook, the results are on par with a 10th gen Intel Core i5 processor, notes Chrome Unboxed. This benchmarking toolset lets you compare performance test results between two different devices. Of course, if you never used an AMD Chromebook from then, you haven nothing to compare this model to. While that may sound good, this is really a slight upgrade from the prior AMD chipsets found in Chromebooks from 2019. The 8 GB of included memory is shared between the Radeon graphics and the CPU. These CPUs are supplemented by a trio of GPU cores. That chip has 2 CPU cores, each capable of running a pair of processing threads, for a total of 4. Specifically, it’s the AMD Ryzen 3 5125C. Out of the four chipsets, the new Acer Chromebook Spin 514 uses base Ryzen chip. These chipsets were said to use AMD’s Zen 3 chip architecture. In this case, I’m making an exception though.Īcer announced this device back in May, saying there were four AMD processors in upcoming Chromebooks.

Typically, I try not to pass judgment on devices that I haven’t personally tested. I’d probably pass on this new AMD Ryzen Chromebook at $549. It’s new and shiny, so you should get it, right? I’m not so sure. And like clockwork, this ChromeOS laptop with a AMD Ryzen CPU showed up at Best Buy for the same price. Earlier this week, I reported that the Acer Chromebook Spin 514 appeared on Acer’s site for purchase.

Acer spin 514 release date