2nd gen Chromebooks to use Ivy Bridge?

Google’s web-focused Chrome OS is a tough concept for many people to swallow, despite the company’s insistence that a browser is good enough for the majority of your computing tasks. But even those willing to consider the web app-dependent platform have gotten hung up on lackluster Chromebook hardware, which chokes when put through heavy use.

Google recently responded to those criticisms, saying that their second round of devices would be faster, and now there’s a hint at how they might fulfill that promise: Intel’s Sandy Bridge and unreleased Ivy Bridge processors.

The clue comes straight from the team working on ChromiumOS, the open-source project behind Google’s operating system. The developers have been making contributions to coreboot, another open-source concept that aims to replace the typical BIOS found in most computers. Google believes they can use coreboot to load Chrome OS “super fast,” and has been adding code to make sure the two will work together. The ChromiumOS team’s latest contribution was support for Cougar and Pather Point chipsets, which are found in Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, respectively.

Between Google’s claims about faster hardware on the horizon and the work they’ve put into supporting Intel’s current and future processors, it seems likely that second generation Chromebooks will move from Atom to Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors. Though that change might impact the highly-touted Chromebook battery life, it sounds like a good move for the Chrome OS platform—if you’re going to focus on the web alone, then you’d better do it well.

 View orginal artical here- CNET