10 April 20, 07:48
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Two unnanounced AMD Ryzen 3000 chips have appeared in a mysterious "Google Zork" device.
A wonderful thing about today's benchmarking tools is that many of them upload results to online databases, giving us sneak peeks at upcoming hardware before their announcements. The latest to fall victim to this trap are AMD's Ryzen 3250C and 3700C, which are CPUs that appeared to have been benchmarked off a "Google Zork" device.
The chips surfaced in the Geekbench databases (Geekbench 4 and Geekbench 5), as spotted by NotebookCheck, with the following specifications.
Specs
AMD Ryzen 7 3700C AMD Ryzen 3 3250C
CPU Cores / Threads
4 / 8 2 / 4
Base Frequency
2.3 GHz 2.6 GHz
Boost Frequency
? ?
TDP
15W 15W
Graphics
Radeon Vega Mobile Radeon Graphics
Geekbench 4 Multi-Core Score
7,382 - 8,322 points -
Geekbench 5 Multi-Core Score
1,317 - 1,739 points 1,191 - 1,409 points
Both chips look to be 15W parts, making them ideal for use in applications with thermal restrictions. NotebookCheck suspects that they are adapted versions of the AMD Ryzen 3700U and 3250U APUs for laptops, which makes sense given that their core counts, TDPs and base frequencies are identical to those respective chips.
Exactly why a Ryzen 3700C and 3250C would exist is unclear though. The C suffix is suspected to stand for 'Convertible,' though we reckon the chips might have either different boost profiles or slightly different graphics architectures to meet the needs of a convertible application.
That being said, it must be noted that it's also possible that these chips won't exist at all: the Geekbench submissions landed on April , and we know painfully little about Google Zork thus far.
What Is Google Zork?
If this isn't some failed April fools joke, then the question remains: What is Google Zork?
We first heard about Zork about a year ago as a reference board with the AMD Picasso chipset, which would serve AMD's APUs with Zen+ and Vega graphics. It's not confirmed, but NotebookCheck suggested that the Zork will end up being a 2-in-1 Google Pixelbook, based on traces in Git repositories for various sensors.
Further details about Google Zork are scarce at this time, except that the motherboard used is based on a "Trembyle" reference board -- apt, given that Trembyle was a character in the video game Return to Zork from way back in 1993.
At this point, there are far too many mysteries for us to make a strong judgment about what's really going on.
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