A new lineup of Chrome devices was unveiled at an event today in San Francisco by Intel and other corporations. These include the first devices powered by Intel Celeron processors based on the Bay Trail-M system-on-chip. The highlight of this event was most certainly the Intel Core i3 4th generation powered Chromebooks. Dell and Acer are two partners that are the first to bring these Chromebooks to the market.
The addition of these processors makes them the most powerful OEM Chromebooks on the market, so said Intel during the event. Intel’s 4th generation Core i3 processors will enable greater performance particularly when surfing multiple tabs of content rich web pages, running multiple web applications, consuming media, running offline applications as well as Google Hangouts with multiple participants.
Dell is expanding its existing Chromebook 11 offering with the addition of a Core i3 4th generation powered model. Chromebook 11 has already been “enthusiastically received” and deployed in school districts around the country. It will be available for purchase later this year.
On the other hand Acer launched its new C720 Chromebook powered by the aforementioned processor. It touts improved performance and battery life thanks to the new silicon. Acer will start selling this device during the early back to school season for $349.99.
At the Intel event we are attending in San Francisco, a couple of new products were announced, the HP Chromebox (see picture below) that will be available in June and the LG All in One Chromebase that will be introduced on May 26th for only $349 (see picture above).
As this new wave of Chromebooks arrives on the market with the Core i3 (4th generation), Intel and Google have gone on the record saying that Chrome OS runs much faster on Intel’s architecture. Web apps run 4X faster and the overall productivity is 3X higher when using web apps like Google Docs and others like it.
It’s not completely surprising, since web browsers can actually consume quite a bit of processor resources and memory. If you just fire Chrome and open one document, a look at a Windows task manager will reveal that it consumes several hundreds of megabytes of memory right there. But the real killer for resources is when people leave many browsing tabs open – and many of us do just that.
Incidentally, Intel has reminded us that its Microprocessors are now conflict-free since Intel takes step to ensure that it does not purchase raw materials form providers that can’t vouch for the origin. While this does not make a difference in how the computers run, it can make a huge difference in the lives of people living in areas where those materials are extracted.
Filed in . Read more about Acer, Chromebooks, Dell and Intel.