Rockchip is working on Chromebooks with cheap RK3288 soc

Chinese chip company Rockchip is working on a cheap Chromebook that will run on the company’s RK3288 quad-core. The developers are currently testing Chromium OS, but the company hopes to ship Chromebooks with Google’s Chrome OS in the third quarter.

The website ARMdevices reports that Rockchip developers are finalizing optimizations for the quadcore RK3288 soc. This 28nm ARM Cortex A12 soc can be clocked up to 1.8GHz and also features an integrated Mali-T764 GPU. The developers currently use Chromium OS, the open source variant of Chrome OS.

When the last dots have been put on the i, Rockchip wants to market the Chromebook worldwide in the third quarter and have it run on Google’s Chrome OS version. It is a 13.3-inch Chromebook with presumably 2GB of RAM. Rockchip indicates that 4GB models may be released.

A short test by ARMdevices with the Fish Tank benchmark shows that the Chromebook can display 500 fish smoothly on the screen, but that the laptop has a hard time with 1000 fish in the water. It is still unclear what profit the developers think they can achieve with further optimizations, and it is also unknown what the final Chromebook will cost.