There has been a lot of speculation about the possibility of the Chrome OS ecosystem expanding to devices powered by chips from AMD and Qualcomm. There’s growing circumstantial evidence to support the theory that AMD might be working on a Chrome OS-based device. The company itself hasn’t said anything about such plans at this point in time but there are whispers on the street about such a device being in the pipeline over at AMD.
References to “amd” were recently discovered in the Chromium repositories and further investigation by the folks at Chrome Unboxed revealed that these references have actually been in the code commits since as far back as 2011.
It seems odd that references to the chipmaker have existed in the commits for almost half a decade and yet there are no AMD-powered Chrome OS out on the market. Granted that this is circumstantial evidence but it does make you think about the possibility.
A new board in the repositories codename “Jadeite” has been tracked since August this year. A few recent commits give the impression that this might be a Chrome OS device that’s powered by an AMD chip. The author of these commits has an “@AMD.com” email address. For all we know, such a device could only be in experimental stages right now and might not even be released.
AMD has not said anything about making chips for Chrome OS devices but given how they are increasingly becoming popular, it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it decided to do so.