Acer’s expected to launch a new Chrome OS laptop with a 13 inch display and an NVIDIA Tegra K1 processor soon. Wondering why you’d want a Chromebook with an ARM-based chip when there are plenty of cheap Intel-powered Chrome laptops which offer 8 hours of battery life?
Because the Acer CB5 Chromebook will get up to 13 hours of run time.
Acer still hasn’t officially launched the new CB5 Chromebook yet, but details about the laptop showed up in a product brochure lat month. Now Notebook Italia has posted a promotional video for the device.
The Acer CB5-311 features a 13.3 inch screen, 802.11ac WiFi, HDMI, USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI output. Acer will offer models with 1366 x 768 pixel or 1920 x 1080 pixel display options and there’s also an option for a touchscreen.
Update:Â The Acer Chromebook 13 is official, and it should ship in September for $280 and up.
It also features NVIDIA’s ARM Cortex-A15 quad-core processor with 192-core Kepler graphics.
While most of these features showed up in the product brochure, the new video gives us a better look at the CB5 Chromebook in action.
What we still don’t know is how much the laptop will cost or when it will be available for purchase.
By the way, the video is responding, “this video is private”
It wasn’t explicitly stated but I assume that this is fanless. I’d like it to have a backlit keyboard. Option of a bigger size, longer batter, and the higher resolution version, would move me to suplement the Samsung XE303 which I got in the first days. – Even that the cover of the Samsung is scratched up, its internals have lived up the the hype of being a newer laptop today then when I first got it.
i just wished it didnt look like complete crap
This has a longer battery life than the Chromebook 2 from samsung, a better optimised SoC (smasung needs to hold off on HMP untill it can use it properly) this has a far superior GPU, but it looks like crap
i can deal with the 8-ish hours of the CB2 and the less potent internals, becasue it looks so much better.
People say the XE303 runs like a dog and is unusable, which i find weird beause i use mine daily and have for the past year and its just gotten faster (unless you like to visit the verge that is) so i have hope that they’ll fix performance of the Exynos 5800 in the CB2 13″, where as you ant fix design after its shipped
Good to see vendors taking the 13.3-inch format more seriously – it’s a perfect balance between screen size and portability.
Absolutely agreed, although, if you want to use a full-HD 13.3″ laptop screen together with a 24″ secondary monitor (often happens at home/work), the font-size difference between the two screens may be a bit annoying (laptop should be way closer placed).
This is not a big problem with a 15,6″/1080p screen + 24″/1080p monitor combo, but it is with 13.3″ fullHD.
This is the best option from Acer so far
Personally I’d like to grab one once I am sure that a Linux driver is available for graphics portion of the chip. The fact that it has native OpenGL support is exciting. In addition Cuda support is really nice to have for OpenCV acceleration as well. Overall I won’t hold my breath, I am still excited about the prospect.
I believe, even older Tegras had proper (though binary) Linux drivers with Xorg support. Kepler ones (like the K1) practically have the same driver as the desktop GPUs so I believe we can expect very good quality drivers from Nvidia on this one.
What I don’t like in Chromebooks is that you cannot get rid of those silly boot-time messages about being in developer/unsafe mode and you need to avoid instinctively press SPACE (which will automatically put it back into user-mode thus barring you from your hand-installed Linux). I will consider a Chromebook again if this can be switched off so it can boot like a normal laptop when I have Ubuntu installed on it.
With most of the chromebooks you could actually change the timeout on that message so it’d automatically boot without having to press anything.
Can one switch off the loud beeping sound as well (after the timeout)?
I wonder how performance will be compared to Haswell Celeron’s. Samsung’s Exynos chips are rather lackluster in the performance category. Hopefully K1 will prove a worthy contender to Intel. Also, I hope Chromebook’s can handle High DPI screens in a similar way Apple does it with their retina MBP’s.
“I wonder how performance will be compared to Haswell Celeron’s.”
I doubt it will be even as fast as a Bay Trail. I’d guess somewhere between an Exynos and a BayTrail.
Well, it’s been benchmarked, looks to be close to a baytrail J1900: https://liliputing.com/2014/05/nvidia-tegra-k1-benchmarked-competitive-celeron-bay-trail.html
Oh but if graphics matter there’s no competition, the K1 comes somewhere between an intel HD 4000 and a 4400
Which is interesting, because – on older PCs – the area that really causes the PC to stutter and the fan to blow is streaming video (aka weak graphics and CPU usage). So for a lot of people, good graphics may be more important real world a lot of the time.
The graphics are supposed to be equivalent to a PS3. This would be good for low end gaming.
OK, this is the one I want. I’m sure the 1920×1080 will be pricey, but 13 hour life, wifi ac, etc… HOT.
I`ve looked at reports from other websites and there are three options: $279 for 1366×768 (13 hours of battery life, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD)
$299 for 1080×1920 (11.5 hours of battery, 2 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD)
& $379 for 1080×1920 (11.5 hours of battery, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD)
*licks lips* Glad to see the K1 getting into some products, here’s hoping nvidia open them up a bit more.
I’m waiting for a K1 Android TV box that’s half the price of a Shield tablet.
$400 (with controller) is too much.
Yep, it is good to see them. Although, it would be even nicer to see the 64bit K1s in action since those should have even higher single-thread performance than the A15 based K1s.