Code points to possible Chromebook with Snapdragon 845

Commits in Chromium OS’s code point to the addition of support for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845. There are already Chromebooks with an ARM chip, but no models with the powerful Snapdragon soc.

These are two commits in ChromiumOS involving a reference board called cheza, which references “qc845,” “Qualcomm64,” and “arm64,” XDA Developers found. It may be about testing a board with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845.

It is therefore not yet certain that a Chromebook with that soc will also appear. In any case, it wouldn’t be the first time a ChromeOS laptop with an ARM chip appears. Earlier, a Samsung Chromebook with Exynos-soc and Asus model with Rockchip processor were released. Recently, the Chromebook Plus from Samsung with rk3399-soc from Rockchip also appeared. Chromebooks with Snapdragons have not yet appeared, the reasons sometimes being that Qualcomm does not want to make certain drivers open source and does not want to support CPUs two years or older.

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 845 early this month, a soc that would be 30 percent faster than the 835. That Snapdragon 835, in turn, appears in Always Connected PCs running Windows on ARM.

Asus Chromebook Flip with Rockchip soc