AMD Sabrina project SoCs powering Google Chromebooks are simply its Mendocino chips in Disguise

Patch notes from the open-source Coreboot project have proved AMD’s enigmatic Sabrina project, which would power Chromebooks, was simply an alias for AMD’s recently announced Zen 2 Mendocino SoCs, according to a report by Phoronix. By Q4 of this year, it has already been established that these new CPUs would be available in popular Windows laptops and Google Chromebooks.

With the help of these chips, Chromebooks will have access to a newly improved Zen 2 core with integrated RDNA2 graphics and 6nm LPDDR5 memory.

For those who are unaware, this narrative began in February when, according to Phoronix, a new Google mainboard known as Skyrim seemed to be fitted with an enigmatic new AMD SoC dubbed Sabrina. The only information that was available about this new processor lineup was that Sabrina and AMD’s Cezanne Ryzen 5000 APUs share code for Coreboot compatibility and LPDDR5 support.

The Mendocino project, which AMD already stated at Computex this year, was Sabrina’s true identity, as revealed by the most recent patch notes from Coreboot. Mendocino is a descendant of AMD’s more potent Rembrandt Ryzen 6000 mobile CPUs, with the same RDNA2 graphics architecture and 6nm node, but dropping the CPU architecture from Zen 3+ to Zen 2 (it is comparable to the Van Gough APU found in the Steam Deck).

As a result of the architecture change, these chips are destined for mainstream notebooks and Chromebooks instead of the mid-range and high-end mobile markets, with a maximum configuration of four cores and eight threads. These chips prioritize good video performance and high battery life instead of raw CPU horsepower.

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