Another new Snapdragon Chromebook for ‘Aluminium OS’ emerges in development

Google’s Aluminium project is picking up speed, and today we have another new development board to add to the mix. For the past few weeks, we’ve been tracking high-end hardware like Lenovo’s ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Ruby’, as well as Acer’s ‘Moonstone’ and the couple Snapdragon X Plus Chromebooks we know are in development: ‘Quenbi’ and ‘Quartz’. All of these devices appear to be anchor devices for Google’s upcoming Android/ChromeOS merger, and they are all shaping up to be awesome-looking laptops/convertibles/tablets.

This morning, a new commit I found in the Chromium Gerrit has revealed another very interesting Chromebook in development. Codenamed ‘Mica’, this board is significant for two reasons: it once again brings Qualcomm’s potent Snapdragon X Plus back into the spotlight (along with ‘Quenbi’ and ‘Quartz’), and it is slated to be an ‘Aluminium OS’ device based on conversations between Qualcomm and Google execs in the past few months.

A quick recap on ‘Bluey’?

For those who haven’t been living in the Gerrit repositories (that’s most of you), ‘Bluey’ is the foundational baseboard for a new generation of high-performance ARM Chromebooks. Unlike the Qualcomm chips of the past that were often repurposed mobile processors, the Snapdragon X series was designed from the ground up to compete with Apple’s M-series and Intel’s Core Ultra silicon in laptop devices.

We’ve previously seen offshoot boards like ‘Quenbi’ and ‘Quartz’ spawn from the Bluey family, and this latest discovery of ‘Mica’ only expands this upcoming ‘Aluminium OS’ device family.

‘Aluminium OS’ in a nutshell

In case you’ve missed all the excitement over the past 6-12 months, ‘Aluminium OS’ (ALOS) is the internal codename for Google’s project to re-baseline ChromeOS on the Android kernel (specifically Android 16). The goal is to create a unified, AI-centric platform that combines the “it just works” nature of ChromeOS with the deep AI advancements and massive app ecosystem of Android.

Finding another Snapdragon X Plus device being developed is a big deal. These chips are absolute monsters when it comes to NPU (Neural Processing Unit) performance, which is exactly what Google needs to run advanced Gemini features and the Android framework natively on a laptop. Paired with Intel’s latest Panther Lake chips and the potent MediaTek Kompanio Ultra, the ‘Aluminium OS’ era is likely going to start with a massive bang.

We’ll be watching this new ‘Mica’ board closely to see which manufacturer is behind it and what kind of form factor it takes. But one thing is certain: the Snapdragon X Plus is going to be a key part of the “Aluminium” future, and that future keeps getting more and more interesting by the day.