The first Chrome OS laptop from Asus appears to be just about ready to ship. The Taiwanese company recently launched its first desktop computer running Google’s Chrome operating system, but we’ve seen suggestions that Asus was also working on Chromebooks.
Now Online Partner has posted a few pictures of the Asus Chromebox and the unannounced Asus C200 Chromebook on Google+.
Detailed specs for the Asus C200 Chromebook aren’t available, but a photo of a sticker on the laptop promises “all-day battery life,” “ultra-thin and light” design, a “larger touchpad,” “high quality audio” and HDMI output.
Like other Chromebooks, Asus C200 customers will also get 100GB of free cloud storage for 2 years with Google Drive.
Asus is also reportedly working on a C300 Chromebook. That model will probably have a 13.3 inch screen while the Asus C200 appears to have an 11.6 inch display.
via OMG Chrome
Waiting on this C300 model as long as its $400 or under. Hopefully it will break the Chromebook standard of 1366 x 768 TFT displays.
I bought the just released $180 ASUS Chromebox a few weeks ago and it’s great. If the C200 is basically a laptop version of the Chromebox, then it’ll be a winner.
Hopefully Asus fits it with an IPS display instead of that utter crap TN display that the Acer c720 uses.
Can someone clarify? Would a Bay Trail atom processor be better than the Haswell Celerons that are in Chromebooks like the Acer C 720?
Depends on what you mean by better. Quick comparison:
Bay Trail Atom CPU Chromebook version
– less powerful CPU
– smaller form factor
– smaller display
– lighter weight
– more cramped keyboard and touchpad
– longer battery life
– less expensive
– smaller SSD storage
– fewer I/O ports
– enough CPU oomph for web surfing, YouTube video
watching, movie playback, online office productivity
Haswell Celeron CPU Chromebook version
– more powerful CPU
– larger form factor
– larger display
– heavier
– more spacious keyboard and touchpad
– shorter battery life
– more expensive
– likely larger SSD storage
– more I/O ports
– more CPU oomph for future offline apps and Chrome OS updates
You’ll have to fill in the outline with the details of actual
products for a real-life comparison. To me, the comparison
is somewhat like between a 12″/13″and a 14″/15″ laptop.
Dual core Haswell Celeron is marginally faster than Quad Core Baytrail in terms of benchmarking, but significantly faster and more responsive in real life performance and responsiveness, due to the fact that it is a lot faster for single and dual threaded workloads. I also think that it is possible that the current Chrome Javascript engine may not be multi-threaded. This is probably the reason Google went for Haswell rather than Baytrail on Chromebooks.
Baytrail does have a lower power consumption though, but this is more important on tablets.
So far one reseller appears to have done some early review work on it and used the Google’s Octane tool, which gave it a score of 7,387 and that’s very competitive with other Chromebooks on the market.
The Haswell Celeron 2955U 1.4GHz does score a bit better at 9253 but that’s still a very close score for architectures that Haswell should have over a 50% advantage… While even a Sandy Bridge Intel Core i3-2377M 1.5GHz only scores about 6939 in the same test… Putting the Bay Trail Celeron 2.16-2.41GHz N2830 right between the Sandy Bridge and Haswell examples…
So the faster clock speed definitely helps compensate for the performance efficiency difference… While you can balance that consideration with the fact the Bay Trail Chromebook has so far turned in run time results of around 10 hours and that’s a clear advantage compared to the other when you consider you’re getting similar range performance that end users may not even notice the difference…
While the Bay Trail N2830 has some advantages, like unlike most Celeron/Pentium models the N2830 represents one of the recently released Bay Trail updates that has features like Quick Sync enabled and that’s important for everything from video editing to support of wireless features like Miracast that relies on Quick Sync to handle the video encoding…
The low 7.5W max TDP is a bit too high to go fan-less but it’s definitely lower than the Haswell’s 15W max TDP and thus the fan should be noticeably quieter for the Bay Trail models…
Chrome OS also makes some use of multiple cores, unlike most other browsers… So has features like the ability to limit crashes to a per tab basis… along with splitting the work load onto multiple cores… Things like downloading a page in the background won’t effect the performance of the tab you’re on, etc…
Also, people dual booting a GNU/Linux Distro could take even more advantage of the 2 cores of the Bay Trail N2830 versus the Haswell dual core 2955U, which has Hyper Threading disabled as well and thus supports no more than two threads at any one time as well…
Btw, the Bay Trail Chromebooks are otherwise the same as other Chromebooks and the C200 is a 11.6″ model and the C300 is a 13.3″ model and thus means the keyboards will not be cramped like George suggested…
Haswell does support faster SATA connections for better SSD performance as Bay Trail is limited to SATA II and doesn’t support SATA III but the Bay Trail does support USB 3.0 and you get one USB 3.0 port with this Asus model…
Overall costs are pretty close, Intel isn’t subsidizing the price of the Celeron/Pentium range like they are the mobile SoCs but these new models are a bit cheaper than the initial releases were but so too are the newer Haswell releases… So still pretty close in pricing and thus you have to consider all the strength and weaknesses of each…
While graphical performance is pretty close as well… Haswell would normally have an advantage but like Bay Trail, the GMA is scaled down to a more basic version for the Celeron/Pentium series… So neither are great for things like gaming, etc. but they should readily handle resolutions up to 2560×1600… Though, HDMI output is normally limited to 1080P (1920×1080 to 1920×1200) but you can use the USB 3.0 port with a display port adapter to support the max output…
Bay Trail does support both eDP and DP but this model only appears to have a HDMI out…
As long as it has a decent keyboard and a haswell celeron. Looks good
ARM or X86?
There is an Intel sticker in one of the pictures.
That is one big touchpad!
it looks to be about the size of mine on my acer aspire s3
that actually looks like a very nice laptop, i’d probably dual-boot with linux