14 DAY TRIAL // Google has become the sort of company you can expect to make a deal with anyone who has even the slightest chance of benefiting its, or from its, software breakthroughs. Now, though, it's one of its few hardware products that is getting attention.
Then again, the Chromebook is not exactly something that Google itself made. Instead, it is a special kind of laptop that uses the Chrome OS operating system, which Google did make.
Chromebooks are now set to greatly benefit from a new agreement between Google and none other than NVIDIA, with VMWare making the collaboration possible.
You might be aware of how Chromebooks are specifically designed with very little hardware, which doesn't amount to much. That's because the laptops are only meant to be access points to the cloud.
Even the storage space doesn't make it beyond 16 GB, because the laptop isn't supposed to store anything on-board. Same for file processing and editing: it's not done by the laptop, but by whatever cloud server the applications in Chrome OS access.
That is where NVIDIA's latest contribution comes in. The company will provide NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology to Google, while VMware will supply Horizon software to optimize graphics and CPU utilization.
Together, these technologies should allow Chromebooks access to the same graphics capabilities as standard notebooks. Better than what can be provided by laptops without discrete chips in fact.
Essentially, not too much time from now, you'll be able to spend a couple hundred bucks on a Chromebook and have access to a virtual desktop with the same capabilities as a high-end mobile workstation.
You'll need to make sure your Internet connection is good, and you'll probably have to pay a monthly fee to be allowed continued use of the cloud-based resources, but it's still impressive considering that the hardware of Chromebooks is not better than that of a netbook (which is pitiable really).
VMware will also contribute with the BLAST Performance technology, which will be installed on the Chromebooks themselves. Well, those based on the NVIDIA Tegra K1 GPU, like Acer Chromebook 13. It will extend battery life by 50% while enhancing graphics quality and end-user experience, which can mean a lot of things.
Customers who want VMware products with NVIDIA GRID vGPU can register for early access to a program that will last throughout the fourth quarter of this year (Q4 2014). By this time in 2015, we may already see weak Chromebooks performing the same tasks as high-end mobile workstations (Photoshop, CAD, etc).