14 DAY TRIAL // If you looked at the Chromebook market a while ago, you could have noticed it was dominated by Samsung Exynos chips and Intel Celeron (Bay Trail) ones. However, recent months have brought about a bit of diversity when it comes to what lies under the bonnet.
The first models bundling Intel Core i3 or NVIDIA Tegra K1 chips have made a debut into the wild, but it appears this is just the beginning.
Rockchip and MediaTek joining in the Chrome fun
According to Asian market watchers reported by DigiTimes, low-cost chip manufacturers like Rockchip and MediaTek are soon going to join in the Chromebook family.
The first products taking advantage of the new architecture will be ready to hit the market as soon as 2015. We can assume the event will happen sometime in the first part of the year.
The integration of Rockchip and MediaTek platforms will help Google build LTE-based Chromebooks that will be sold for super affordable price-tags. This strategy is expected to bring about great profit, as shipments for the new Chromebook models are envisioned to grow with 100%.
The first Chromebook with Rockchip showed up some time ago
What Asian sources are reporting here isn’t exactly a novelty. Back at Computex, a Chromebook taking advantage of a Rockchip made a brief appearance, being showed cased during a presentation.
The device has a 13.3-inch display with the standard 1366 x 768 pixel resolution and was based on a quad-core Rockchip RK3288 (Cortex A12) silicone with Mali-T764 CPU.
The Chromebook seemed pretty reminiscent of a MacBook Air on the outside, so it kindled hopes that future Chrome-OS laptops taking advantage of the Rockchip architecture will be even lighter and thinner than their predecessors.
Back then we were told that the first Rockchip Chromebooks will become available sometime in the third quarter of 2014, but this is apparently not the case. And according to the new report, we’ll have to wait another few months before seeing such products in the wild.
As for MediaTek, this is the first time we’ve ever heard of the chip manufacturer in relation to Chromebooks, but it’s no wonder. If Rockchip can do it, so can MediaTek.
Anyway, in related scenario Chromebooks are likely to be getting other new chip additions in the near future. A recent rumor claimed that Intel’s new Broadwell platform will play nice with the insides of Google’s laptops too.
Given what the apparent trends seem to be, we can expect the Chromebook ecosystem to become increasingly varied as Google tries to stand against Microsoft’s new wave of inexpensive Windows 8.1 laptops, dubbed Bingbooks.