Google reportedly pushing for Chromebook development with high performance ARM SoCs

Justin Kahn

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Google is working on Chromebooks based on high performance ARM SoCs and Intel's Bay Trail technology, according to recently surfaced Chrome OS source code. Some reports are suggesting that Google is pushing its OEMs to create Chromebooks with ARM technology, but the recent leaks appear to show that the company has devices with both in the works.

At this point, it looks as though there is already talk of at least one of Google's OEMs working on a Chromebook running Nvidia's Tegra 4 chip. As you may know, the Tegra 4 brings together a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU running at 1.90 GHz, with Nvidia's 72 core GeForce ULV graphics. This kind of power will be more than suitable for Chrome OS, as it can easily handle high res Android tablets with a display resolution of up to 2560 x 1600 pixels.

google chromebook arm socs intel nvidia arm soc chrome os source code tegra 4 bay trail geforce ulv graphics arm cortex-a15 cpuThe leaked code is also suggesting there are more powerful Chromebooks with Intel SoCs on the way as well. The report points at Chromebooks with Atom Bay Trail SoCs under the codenames "Bayley Bay" and ‘"rambi." It mentions a Chromebook with an Intel Atom E3845 SoC inside, a quad-core x86-64 CPU running at 1.91 GHz. Although they have a very similar form factor, the Bay Trail option does hold a specific advantage over the Tegra 4 in that it's capable of supporting 64-bit and more than 4GB of system memory.

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I was wondering why this was not the case at the beginning. Battery life and price might have been a lot more manageable to take the SoC route. It wasn't like people could write programs that ran directly on the hardware till recently.

I always felt that the Pixel was over powered for the OS. We would be dependent on Google to provide software to come close to using the hardware. Thus, IMHO it was a waste of money because you could not get at the performance and cool hardware features.
 
I'm not sure why (at least in the immediate future) anyone would need more than 4 gigs of RAM on a cloud computing device, but I guess there's always those folks who want as much power as possible. I'd love a Tegra 4 chip in my chromebook, personally.
 
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