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Google Chrome OS is an upcoming operating system with a heavy emphasis on web integration. At launch, Google plans to optimize the operating system to work with netbooks. NVIDIA Tegra is a platform that bundles a low power ARM-based processor with NVIDIA graphics to enable 1080p video playback on extremely low power devices. What happens when you put Tegra and Chrome OS together? Well, I don’t know, but it looks like we’re going to find out soon.

Kevin Tofel at jkOnTheRun reports that NVIDIA is working on Tegra devices running Google Chrome. Up until now we’d only seen prototypes running Windows CE and Google Android (and the Microsoft ZuneHD operating environment).

Windows XP, Vista, and 7 won’t run on ARM based processors, which means that mini-laptops with these low power chips will have to look elsewhere for operating systems. While a number of Linux distributions can run on ARM processors, the backing of Google could make Chrome (or Android) a popular choice for smartbook makers.

No word on when we’ll see Tegra+Chrome devices hit the market, but since Google Chrome OS isn’t expected to be widely available on netbooks until 2010, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that we won’t see anything before the end of the year.