The good news and bad news of HP’s new AMD Chromebook

Good news: HP made an AMD Chromebook. Bad news: It uses an old chipset.

Meet the new HP Chromebook 14. This is one of the first Chromebooks powered by an AMD processor. But don’t get too excited. This isn’t the AMD-powered Chromebook a lot of people were waiting for. This Chromebook is powered by a really old AMD chipset.

Traditionally, Chromebooks use Intel chips. But in the summer of 2018, word spread that Chromebooks would eventually be offered with Qualcomm and AMD chips — both offering unique advantages over their Intel counterparts. The Qualcomm models, in theory, could offer always-on connectivity options with stellar battery life while the AMD could, in theory, bring better graphic render capabilities to Chromebooks.

This HP Chromebook offers neither.

The new HP Chromebook 14 packs a AMD Dual-Core A4-9120. This chip was released in June 2016. Compared to the chips in other Chromebooks announced at CES 2019, this chip is slower and has less power management capabilities. On the upside it packs Radeon R4 graphics, but again, when paired with the older silicon, the net result will not likely be a impressive as it could be.

Hopefully, this model will lead to another AMD Chromebook but one with a modern chipset.