Enlarge / Asus' Chromebook Flip CX5 was one of the streaming-oriented gaming Chromebooks announced late last year. (credit: Asus)

Google and some of its Chromebook partners decided to try making " gaming Chromebooks " a thing late last year. These machines included some gaming laptop features like configurable RGB keyboards and high refresh rate screens, but because they still used integrated GPUs, they were meant mostly for use with streaming services like Nvidia's GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming .

But there were also apparently plans for some gaming Chromebooks with the power to play more games locally. Earlier this year, 9to5Google spotted developer comments earlier this year pointing to a Chromebook board (codenamed Hades) that would have included a dedicated GeForce RTX 4050 GPU like the one found in some Windows gaming notebooks. This board would have served as a foundation that multiple PC makers could have used to build Chromebooks.

But these models apparently won't be seeing the light of day anytime soon. Developer comments spotted by About Chromebooks this week indicate that the Hades board (plus a couple of other Nvidia-equipped boards, Agah and Herobrine) has been canceled, which means that any laptops based on that board won't be happening.

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  The Ryzen 9 7945X3D is essentially a desktop Ryzen 9 7950X3D repackaged for laptops. [credit: AMD ]

For a couple of years now, AMD has offered special versions of its desktop processors with an extra 64MB chunk of L3 cache included. This cache is layered over top of the existing CPU silicon, earning it the name "3D V-Cache," and it has proven especially successful for accelerating cache-sensitive software like games.

Today, AMD is announcing the first 3D V-Cache processor for laptops, the Ryzen 9 7945X3D. It's a version of the regular 16-core Ryzen 9 7945HX with that same 64MB chunk of cache added in, giving it a total of 144MB of L3 cache.

The 7945HX is essentially a version of the desktop Ryzen 9 7950X repackaged for use in laptops instead of high-end desktops; while chips like the similarly named 7940HS use one monolithic silicon die for everything from the CPU cores to the chipset to the integrated GPU, the 7950HX uses a pair of 8-core CPU chiplets and a separate I/O die.