Acer Chromebook 13: First Impressions

As I said before, the killer ARM laptop of 2014/Q1 2015 would be this future (unannounced yet) Acer/ASUS/HP machine based on 64-bit Tegra K1 Denver running at its cruising speed 2.5 GHz fanless. Denver is said to be pin-compatible with original Tegra K1, so Acer is technically closer to launch a next to Chromebook 13 CB5-311-T1UU,  currently top model with 4GB RAM, 1920x1080 13" screen and 32GB SSD for $379. As of today, outside Nvidia nobody can offer his/her first impressions, but what was shown here is quite impressive:




I will update this my post as soon as "real" hands-on reviews and tear-downs will start to show.

For myself, I only wish a similar laptop, only Denver based, will show up before Christmas for about $450. This would be a real treat.

Ольга, вот такой Эйсер должен продаваться и в России, но на пару сотен дороже. Весьма рекомендую. Вместо корявого Скайпа будете использовать Hangouts от Гугла. Если продаваться не будет из-за санкций и т.п., готовьте денюшку, переправлю.

UPDATE: First hands on review by Robert Smith has shown up here: https://plus.google.com/communities/105678482604512626671/stream/ef3b6746-7048-4bb6-b941-7a9845d930c3. There are also 17+ comments on the article, they are interesting too.

First impression of this reviewer is it's well below Celeron 2955U in performance. My take on this news is it will be very good if it could reach levels of performance of Celeron N2830. However, a future Chrubuntu distro for Tegra K1 (say, based on Nvidia cooked Ubuntu 14.04 for their dev board Jetson TK1) may move benchmarks up a little, but that's it IMHO.

So, as I said before, $379 for a top model of Acer Chromebook 13 is way too stiff a price when it's close to a 2 year old Acer C7 in terms of performance, just showing smoother high bitrate 1080p playback.

Moving on, and waiting for the Tegra 64 bit Denver K1 to show up. But before that, it would be interesting to see a first teardown of this Acer: who knows, maybe it has a socketed Tegra K1 capable of being upgraded to Denver K1.

And before that some humour: