14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday we talked about VAIO Z and VAIO Z Canvas Ultrabooks which appear to be the first models to take advantage of the new Broadwell-U platform arriving into the wild.
But Chromebooks too are getting more and more powerful, and at some point we’re going to see Celeron Broadwell-U and Pentium Broadwell-U Chrome OS laptops make a debut into the wild.
Chromebooks with Skylake are already on the radar
Well, these models will start being available now, but as a report coming out of Fudzilla points out, come Q4 these Chromebooks will be given a makeover consisting in the adoption of the Intel Skylake platform.
The top of the line are Skylake Core i5 or Core i7, but since most Chromebooks are based on Celerons or Pentiums, it’s very unlikely that we will see laptops taking advantage of this platform. Maybe device makers looking to offer more premium models will adopt the Skylake-U Core i3 platform at some point (based on Skylake-Y).
Taking cues from the preliminary comparative tests conducted on the first sample pre-production chips, Skylake-Y is expected to offer reduced fuel consumption by as much as 60%.
So future Chromebooks might be launched with the similar computing power (compared to what we have today) but with much greater autonomy. Moreover, Skylake might bring about the possibility of wireless charging, which has been previously rumored to be reaching Chromebooks at some point.
Chromebooks will get better but will pricing too?
Pricing is something Chromebook manufacturers need to consider well before launching such a machine into the market. The average Chrome OS laptop sits between $200 / €175 and $300 / €264 and models priced above won’t probably be met with great enthusiasm.
However, models such as the HP Chromebook 14 and Acer CB5 have brought to the market offerings taking advantage of more powerful chips like the Tegra K1.
Acer and Dell are also selling models with Intel Core i3 (Haswell) chips and the former has already rolled out the first model with Broadwell architecture.
But come Q4 2015, we can expect to see Chromebooks live longer and perform better with prices hopefully gravitating around the same margin.