Google's Already Working On Haswell Chromebooks

Intel hasn't yet even released their Haswell processors to the general public for use within notebooks, ultrabooks, and desktops, but Google engineers are already hard at work on prepping Haswell Chromebooks.

Hitting the Coreboot repository yesterday was some Haswell-related commits by Google/Chrome developers, e.g. haswell: use dynamic cbmem and haswell boards: support added chromeos function, among others.

While other hardware vendors are already working on notebook/ultrabook designs for Haswell, it's a bit surprising to see this Google Chrome OS focused work already hitting Coreboot. Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge Chromebooks didn't arrive until well after the initial hardware launch as did the Coreboot support.

Chromebooks aren't exactly meant as the ultimate performance device, which adds to the curiosity about Haswell Chromebooks, unless the power envelope ends up being well worth it. The ARM Cortex-A15 Chromebook is extremely interesting right now and it will be interesting to see how the performance compares on a per-Watt basis, including for tablets.

Regardless, it's nice to see Intel and Google continuing to advance their open-source hardware support initiatives.