Acer is expected to launch several new Chromebooks this year, featuring Bay Trail and NVIDIA Tegra K1 chips. The company also recently updated the Acer C720 lineup with a model with an Intel Core i3 Haswell processor.
But it looks like there’s another spec bump in store for Acer’s Chromebook family.
According to a product brochure, Acer will offer an Acer C720 Chromebook with an Intel Celeron 2957U processor this year. That’s a new chip that, quite frankly, is nearly identical to the Celeron 2955U chip that ships in today’s C720 Chromebooks.
But that’s not the only item of interest in the product brochure. It looks like Acer will continue to offer models with standard or touchscreen displays — which could mean we’ll see a touchscreen version of the new Acer C720p Chromebook featuring a Core i3 processor.
That could make the upcoming laptop not only one of the most powerful Chromebooks on the market, but one of the few with a touchscreen.
Sadly it looks like folks who want a high resolution display will have to opt for a different model. While the Acer CB5 Chromebook with an NVIDIA processor will be available with a full HD screen, all of the Acer C720 models will continue to have 11.6 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel displays for the foreseeable future.
Looks like Acer will have the widest array of Chromebooks in the business. I only hope that they’ll bring the CB5 to the US fast! Brad, do you think the performance of the CB5 will be comparable, or maybe even slightly better than the Bay Trail Chromebooks? How much do you think the CB5 will cost, and is there any indication about a release date here? How about pricing?
According to notebookcheck.net;
>In contrast to the very similar Celeron 2955U, the 2957U supports Wireless Display (WiDi) as well as Quick Sync.
I guess that would be nice. I think calling it a ‘spec bump’ is being a little generous though.. refresh, maybe?
According to the Intel Ark websites both chips support Quick Sync and neither supports WiDi.
https://ark.intel.com/products/78942/Intel-Celeron-Processor-2957U-2M-Cache-1_40-GHz
https://ark.intel.com/products/75608/Intel-Celeron-Processor-2955U-2M-Cache-1_40-GHz