New Haswell-Based Chromebooks Unveiled

Aside from the Intel Bay Trail unveiling today, exciting news out of the Intel Developer Forum today is a set of new Chromebooks thanks to Google and their partners. Being at IDF, these are Intel-based devices and using the latest-generation Haswell CPUs.

Google Chromebooks have become more and more exciting and while right now I really enjoy the Samsung Series 3 Chromebook due to its employment of the ARM Cortex-A15 via the Samsung Exynos 5 Dual SoC, today's Chromebooks are x86-based.

Google claims that the new Haswell-based Chromebooks deliver improved battery performance of more than twice as much as previous generation Chromebooks while also delivering better system performance. Based upon my Intel Haswell experiences since before the CPUs were publicly unveiled, these claims are quite possible. The power efficiency improvements for Haswell are amazing, the Intel Haswell integrated graphics are a big upgrade, and the overall CPU enhancements are nice as well. It's been a joy playing with all sorts of Intel Haswell hardware on Linux.

The new Haswell Chromebooks are coming from Acer, HP, ASUS, and Toshiba. Being Intel Haswell based and Google's openness around Chromebooks in the past, it should be easily possible to load your favorite Linux distribution on these laptops too should you not like Chrome OS.

More details on the new Haswell Chromebooks can be found via the Google Chrome blog.