Acer, Asus, Dell, and Lenovo all plan to launch Chromebooks featuring Intel’s Bay Trail processors.

The low-power chips make it possible to offer laptops with long battery life and low heat generation: these will be the first Intel-powered Chrome OS laptops to feature fanless designs.

bay trail chrome

Intel says some models will offer up to 11 hours of battery life, systems will measure about 0.7 inches thick, and these models could be lighter than Chromebooks with Haswell chips.

Some models will feature Intel Atom processors while others will have more powerful Celeron or Pentium chips, but these are all low-power systems. They do come with some fancy features though: select models will have 802.11ac WiFi, for instance. And Lenovo’s N20p Chromebook, for example, has a toucshcreen display that folds back 300 degrees.

chrome bay trail

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5 replies on “Intel unveils Bay Trail Chromebooks”

  1. $349 seems overpriced, the $199 intel celeron 2955 in Acer c720 works fine. The 6 hour battery there is enough for me and I don’t mind a small fan. Should I buy the $199 Acer c720 and not wait for the i3 Acerc720?

    1. If you’re only going to use Chrome then it may be a bit overkill to use a Core i3…. But if you plan on dual booting a GNU/Linux distribution then you may benefit from the extra performance.

      The Acer C720 is an good deal at $199 but keep in mind build quality… The Bay Trail Chromebooks will likely have better build quality to make them thinner and lighter… Not needing a fan helps… And the performance advantage of the 2955U isn’t very large, also the Bay Trail supports Quick Sync and Intel virtualization extension support… While providing a nearly double the battery life…

      They’re also starting to add touch screens to the newer Chromebooks as another reason for the pricing…

  2. Any 10 inchers with small bezels? I’m hoping to get a small notebook running OpenSUSE but all the current devices are hybrids which tend to need large bezels for the tablet mode. Plus there’s the 32-bit only UEFI.

  3. Lighter, much longer battery, fanless, probably as cheap, … what’s not to like?

    1. Performance, likely screen resolution, amount of memory installed.
      I hope they prove me wrong.

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