Next-gen Chromebooks might sport Ivy Bridge processors

The Google Chrome OS made its debut with the notebook running on Intel Atom low power processors. The positive aspect of this is that they Acer AC700 and Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks get decent battery life but also analyzing the negative points, we find that they might be a little sluggish for computers and that they don’t even actually run much software beside the obvious- web browser.

But now the sluggish performances could just be a thing of the past, with the AC700 and Series 5 available for purchase. Samsung has already shown off with its Chromebook equipped with a faster Intel Celeron processor. The launching of the Samsung Chromebook is just round the corner; there is enough proof to say that future Chromebooks could have Intel Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processors.

There have been some recent code additions in the Chromium OS, which is the open source version of the Chrome OS, said a source at Phoronix. The code adds the Coreboot BIOS support for the chipsets which are widely used in Intel’s current Sandy Bridge line of processors as well as the company’s upcoming Ivy bridge platform.

Coreboot is the basic function which lets the open source boot environment to load the Operating System even quicker. The addition of Coreboot support by Google, for faster Intel chips means that we might not only see faster boot speeds, but even faster overall performance.

But this could even mean that Google is hedging its bet in case any PC makers decide to release Chromebooks with processors. This would not necessarily mean that there’s any new hardware in the works for now, at least.

But a few evidences do stand supportive to the fact that Chromebooks with ARM-based processors are in the works. Developers all over the forums have been submitting Chromium OS bug reports from a couple of unannounced machines including the one with a Samsung Exynos processor. For now, the computer is code-named as “Daisy”. 

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