From PC World: Acer’s new Chromebook 13, announced and available for pre-sale Monday, brings advanced processing power to a category that’s better known for pushing cheaply made, basic browsing machines.
Its 13.3-inch display alone would garner attention (most Chromebooks have squinty 11-inch screens), but it’s what’s inside that really counts—and it ain’t Intel. The Chromebook 13 runs Nvidia’s Tegra K1 chip, a mobile processor announced at CES early this year.
The Tegra K1 is a 32-bit, quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU, with an industry-first 192 graphics cores. You can count ‘em yourself, right on the die shot shown here.
It sounds like something that would run fast, but hot. Quite the contrary, says Nvidia. In a briefing with PCWorld, the company showed a prototype Chromebook 13 that didn’t even have cooling fans.
The company explained that in addition to the four main CPUs, which can be independently enabled and disabled to adjust power consumption, the chip runs basic online activities, such as web browsing and email, on yet one more core that's tuned to be battery-efficient. According to Nvidia this architecture lets the Acer Chromebook 13's HD version last up to 13 hours on a single charge, while the Full HD versions will last up to 11.5 hours (more on their configurations below). Either time is long for any laptop, let alone a Chromebook.
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