Intel has, along with several OEMs, announced that Bay Trail processors will be coming to Chromebooks in the coming months, with several key advantages.
One significant development is the increase in battery life to around 11 hours on the new Bay Trail Chromebooks. Intel suggested that's a significant improvement on the last generation, but should yield at least an extra hour of battery life.
The first Bay Trail Chromebooks will come from Toshiba, Acer and Asus with a Lenovo model, the N20P being the first to be available in August.
Intel, of course, already claims that Chromebooks running its processors are faster than those running on its competitor products. But there's not much of a surprise there. It also pointed out that on Intel currently makes 64bit processors for Chromebooks, although again, with the modest memory specifications in most machines, we don't see the 4GB RAM limit on 32bit as being anywhere near as big a problem as on desktops and laptops.
Other Bay Trail advantages include 802.11ac on many of the new Chromebooks and Chromeboxes. They're also the first Intel-powered Chromebooks that can be fanless in design and have a reduced size and more interesting design that existing models. Intel suggests that Bay-trail-powered devices can be 15 per cent lighter and thinner than Haswell-based models.
Other news from Google suggests that the Chromebook range was selling well, and was well-received by the public. Citing positive Amazon reviews and a good score for the $199 C720 as proof of that. But Google has also sold Chromebooks to 10,000 schools in the US now and claims that businesses are adopting the platform as a way of getting off Windows XP for minimal extra cost.
