- HP has quietly listed the EliteBoard G2a keyboard PC in the US and UK, from $3,028 to $4,191 for the Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450 model with a 32Wh battery
- The underlying AMD Gorgon Point refresh adds just 100MHz over the G1a's Ryzen AI 7 PRO 350, with identical cores, cache, Radeon 860M graphics, and a 50 TOPS NPU
- Entry-level pricing has roughly doubled since the G1a's $1,499 debut as DRAM costs soar and HP's PC shipments fall 30.9% year over year
HP has slipped a second-generation keyboard PC onto its web store with remarkably little fanfare.
The EliteBoard G2a appeared on HP's US and UK sites around nine months after the EliteBoard G1a's CES 2026 unveiling, and we couldn't find a press release to go with it.
The top configuration, listed as the E6FY3UA SKU, pairs AMD's Ryzen AI 7 PRO 450 with 32GB of DDR5-5600, a 512GB SSD, a 32Wh battery, and a detachable USB-C cable, and costs $4,191 before discounts, or $4,167 with the cable attached.
A hard-to-resist Commodore comparison for an EliteBoard G1A with slightly better silicon
A Commodore comparison is hard to resist when it comes to the EliteBoard G2a. The C64 also made its debut at CES in Las Vegas in January 1982, packed a whole computer under its keys, and borrowed someone else's screen, usually the family TV. It went on sale that August for $595, roughly $2,000 in today's money, and the Computer History Museum still ranks it as the best-selling computer model of all time.
HP's flagship G2a costs about seven times the C64's launch price, around double its inflation-adjusted price, and carries roughly half a million times its 64KB of RAM and, somewhat unimpressively, on a single stick.
The G2a is essentially the G1a, which TechRadar Pro recently covered, but with one small caveat: it has a slightly faster APU under the hood. The underlying chip is AMD's Gorgon Point silicon, part of the Ryzen AI 400 family AMD launched at CES, and it's a mild upgrade over the G1a's configuration, coming with only a 100 MHz boost.
The chip also supports faster LPDDR5X-8533 memory, but that's moot here, since the EliteBoard uses DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs in a single-channel configuration.
The keyboard-cum computer also carries over the same fatal memory limitations that the G1a has: a single 32GB SO-DIMM memory stick that limits bandwidth by running in single-channel mode. This would affect on-device AI performance and general compute needs, as the APU's iGPU and NPU use the same memory for localized models.
This hasn't stopped HP from leaning on novelty, however; At CES, the company pitched the G1a as the first complete AI PC ever to live inside a keyboard, with Guayente Sanmartin, president of HP's commercial systems and displays division, promising "next-generation local AI power in a keyboard-sized form factor."
A footnote ironically does the heavy lifting here: the claim covers only keyboard-chassis PCs with an NPU rated at 40 TOPS or more plus enterprise-grade CPU, memory, storage and I/O, a definition that neatly rules out every keyboard computer that came before.
There were plenty of such candidates; beyond the C64 and the Amiga 500, which TechRadar's CES coverage also invoked, Asus announced the Atom-powered Eee Keyboard at CES 2009 and later sold it in the US for $499, a device our coverage once called "one of the most bizarre concepts for a computer we have ever seen."
The G2a also seems to be the victim of a deepening memory crisis that has driven prices up, even as its sibling, the G1a, has a starting price of $1,499 that is no longer in play, with much higher MSRPs being displayed (then cut down by discounts) by HP.
The G2a is a solid computer despite its limitations and eye-watering price tag at the high end. It might, however, see better business discounts than retail pricing that could make it an easier choice for some IT managers.
However, when performance matters and suitable Nvidia RTX Spark, DGX Spark, and AMD Strix Halo alternatives are cheaper and faster for the same money, it may be a hard sell unless the discounts are substantially higher.