Acer's Latest Chromebook Should Be Quite Powerful & Attractive

Acer has introduced its newest Chromebook today and it's powered by the mighty powerful Tegra K1 SoC.

The Chromebook 13 is Acer's newest venture with Google for a Chrome OS laptop. Making this Chromebook attractive to us is its NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC, which features four 2.1GHz processing cores plus its fifth companion core. I've been using the Tegra K1 extensively with the Jetson TK1 ARM development board and the performance is terrific out of the quad-core Cortex-A15 chip with Kepler-grade graphics.

Besides shipping with the Tegra K1, the $299 Chromebook 13 model also has a 13.3-inch 1920 x 1080 panel, 2GB DDR3 L memory, USB 3.0, Bluetooth 4.0, and a reported 11 hour battery life. Given the performance potential out of the Tegra K1, the 11 hour battery rating is quite good, assuming you're using it for lightweight web browsing.

As soon as those with extra time on their hands manage to get an upstream Linux distribution running well as an alternative to Chrome OS, I'll probably be picking up an Acer Chromebook 13 for further Tegra K1 benchmarking and testing outside of the Jetson TK1 development board. The Tegra K1 is also promising as NVIDIA continues contributing to Nouveau to improve the open-source "GK20A" Kepler graphics inside the TK1.

Learn more about this latest high-performance ARMv7 Chromebook at Acer.com.