14 DAY TRIAL // Chromebooks are light, inexpensive notebooks built for online computing that offer a decent set of specifications for a fair price.
Nevertheless, Chromebooks might soon step out of the realm of mid-range devices. In an interesting turn of events, an unannounced Acer Chromebook running an NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor has been spotted on the website of a Swedish retailer, reports Martin Roos.
The device goes by the name of Acer Chromebook CB5 and it is a 13.3-inch laptop. For the time being, customers can’t purchase the device and the page says that the model is “no longer in their catalog.” Nevertheless, the news is now out.
Even so, for the time being, it’s best that we take the information with a grain of salt, because the Acer Chromebok CB5 might turn out not to be real after all.
Now, for a more detailed look upon the specs. The upcoming Chromebook appears to boast a 13.3-inch HD display, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of solid-state storage and runs Google Chrome OS.
Naturally, the interesting bit revolves around the fact that the lappy is powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 processor, which is based on a quad-core ARM-based chip with 192-core graphics.
The notebook also bundles two USB 3.0 ports, Ethernet jack and headset jack. There is no mention of what kind of resolution the machine might bring about, but hopefully, it will be full HD.
On top of that, we haven’t seen a whole lot of products bundling the NVIDIA’s new Tegra K1 chip architecture. For the time being, only popular Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi has introduced the MiPad tablet, which takes advantage of that particular platform.
The chip is also expected to make it into smartphones, probably. But until then, will we see it power the future generation of Chromebooks?
But what benefits could an ARM-based chip like this bring? We’re not exactly sure. Chromebooks making use of the Intel Bay Trail platform or Haswell chips are capable of delivering long battery life and good-enough performance.
So in the upcoming months, we can expect good things from the Chromebook department. You might also remember that back at Computex 2014, we got to see a Chrome OS laptop running on a Rockchip processor.
The device is the first one of its kind and IT is said to arrive on the market somewhere around Q3 with a 13.3-inch form factor and 1366 x 768 pixel resolution.