12th Gen Intel Alder Lake Chromebook ‘Brya’ begins development

We are currently tracking nearly two-dozen 11th generation Intel Tiger Lake Chromebooks and I’m sure that this list will continue to grow in the coming months. With the first-ever virtual CES right around the corner, we are anticipating that Google, Intel, and their partnering OEMs will have some exciting announcements around the next generation of Chrome OS devices that will feature the Tiger Lake CPUs that comes packed with Intel’s powerful Xe graphics.

Honestly, Tiger Lake should put Chrome OS in a place where CPU power is never an issue. Once fully leveraged by Chrome OS and Crostini Linux, the Xe graphics will give Chromebooks everything they need to do just about anything that you can imagine and that could even include full-blown video editing. That said, the future of Chrome OS is looking bright and Google is wasting no time in preparing for the next wave of chips from Intel. Aside from the below roadmap displays at Intel’s Architecture Day back in August, the new Alder Lake Hybrid CPU is still a bit of a mystery. From the scant leaked information that we have, we know that Alder Lake will be Intel’s debut of the hybrid technology that matches the company’s small “Mont” cores with the large “Cove” cores. The goal here is to produce a CPU that is not only powerful enough for serious computing but efficient enough to compete with lower-powered mobile chips.

Alder Lake is rumored to debut at some point in the latter half of 2020 but we discovered work being done on the mysterious CPU in the Chromium repository all the way back in April of this year. That’s very exciting news considering the fact that we likely won’t see our first 11th gen Tiger Lake Chromebook in the flesh until January at the earliest. That likely means that Alder Lake Chromebooks will be the generation that will kick off 2022 and who knows how far along Chrome OS will be in that span of time. Chromebooks could have access to tools such as Thunderbolt, USB 4, and perhaps even external GPUs. The sky’s the limit and Alder Lake could usher in a new era of Chrome OS for the masses.

All that to say, we now have our first look at an actual development device using the Alder Lake processors. Codenamed ‘Brya’, this lays the groundwork for future devices that will become the latest and greatest Chromebooks on the market. The curious thing about this commit that adds the new board is the fact that it references “Alder Lake-P.” Leaks around the new CPU have pointed to the nomenclature being “Alder Lake-S.” Perhaps this is a different chip in the same series or maybe, like AMD, Intel is given Chrome OS CPUs their own branding. Only time will tell.

UPSTREAM: mb/google/brya: Add new google brya mainboard

This commit is a stub for brya, which is a an Intel Alder Lake-P reference platform.

I know a year plus may seem like forever but this roadmap is exciting for Chromebook users. If a recent report from Forbes is accurate, Alder Lake may offer the “biggest performance leap in 14 years” for Intel’s CPUs. That’s a bold statement especially for a chip that is a new take on the way x86 processors are designed. Considering the leap from Skylake to Comet Lake was relatively massive, Alder Lake could bring the promise of more power and the battery life that we expect from Chrome OS. We’ll be keeping track of ‘Brya’ as I would expect to see baseboards branching off for development very soon.

Source: Chromium repository