This month has been a bad month for Intel. First, Apple announced its new MacBook Air with M1 and MacBook Pro with M1 with Apple Silicon, which dominates Intel-based laptops in benchmarks and battery life.

And now comes word that AMD may be making a big bite into Chromebooks.

And now comes word that AMD may be making a big bite into Chromebooks, as it appears that AMD is preparing more Ryzen processors for Chrome OS-based machines.

If new findings from Chromium Gerritt, a web-based code collaboration tool for software developers, are to be believed, Google's Chromebooks will likely be powered by AMD's Ryzen chips in 2021. This could be a major blow to Intel.

The new Chromebook baseboards, named Guybrush, Mancomb, and Majolica, will likely feature AMD's new Zen 3 Cezanne chipset, according to a leak by Twitter user ExecutableFix and three Ryzen 5000 U-series chips based on the Cezanne will be available next year.

Intel still dominates in many areas of notebook chips, but AMD is taking some market share. At the low end, the Ryzen 3000 series of mobile processors are being used in more affordable WIndows 10 notebooks.

On the high end, meanwhile, AMD is putting its 7-nanometer Zen 2 architecture into its Ryzen 4000 series laptop chips. While these chips are not yet widespread in laptops, they have shown excellent performance in the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, for example.

Currently, Intel has Tiger Lake chips on the 10nm process node that offer solid performance. However, the results we have seen so far have not been enough to overwhelm us in generational performance.

In other words, Intel is already facing a growing threat from AMD. And with Apple pulling away from Intel to create its own ARM-based chip line for Mac machines, Intel could be challenged from all sides.

Intel has long offered low-power chips for Chromebooks. But whatever the leak, Chromebook makers may ditch Intel chips in favor of AMD CPUs built around the new and improved third-generation Zen architecture

According to Statista, by 2020 this 20 million Chromebooks have shipped so far. This is 2.4 million more than the 17,684,000 Macbooks Apple shipped in 2019. So it is clear that there is a huge opportunity here for AMD.

This is not the first time that AMD Ryzen processors have been used in Chromebooks; the HP Pro c645 had a Ryzen processor option. However, since this was an enterprise-grade Chromebook, AMD has plenty of room to enter the consumer Chromebook market. And the next-generation Ryzen chips could be just the vehicle to drive that inroad. [Indeed, while AMD has yet to release a Zen 3-based desktop processor, the Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 laptop processor promises significant performance gains due to better efficiency and the ability to process more instructions per clock. [According to leaks, the Ryzen 7 5800U will offer 8 cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock speed of 4.4 GHz.

This performance is definitely overkill for a Chromebook. However, if Google is planning to develop a Chrome OS machine with features other than Google Docs and web browsing, this chip may be the performance Google is looking for.

Kent Duke of Android Police reports that while scrubbing Gerritt, he found evidence that touchscreens will be available on the upcoming Chromebook, suggesting a convertible tablet configuration.

But even if future Chromebooks will not feature Zen 3-based Ryzen processors, leaked information details how the CPUs will offer loaded cores and significant clock speeds to reasonably contain power consumption. For example, the Ryzen 3 5400U is said to have 4 cores and 8 threads, a clock speed of 4 GHz, and a thermal design power consumption of 10-25 watts. This is very promising performance for a notebook chip.

Leaked information such as this is worth accepting with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, these leaks suggest that 2021 will be a very interesting year for AMD processors, Chromebooks, and laptops. And they serve as a warning that Intel needs to continue to innovate, or its position as CPU king could start to erode further.