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If you’re like me, the first thought that just crossed your mind was “what in the world is Jasper Lake?” Maybe not but when the commit crossed my path yesterday with the reference “chipset-jsl”, I was confused, to say the least. We track a lot of devices here at Chrome Unboxed and in doing so, there are many references to the processors that are at the core of each board. Lately, we’ve spent a lot of time following the growing number of “chipset-cml” A.K.A. Intel Comet Lake Chromebooks that are better known by their baseboard name, ‘Hatch‘.
These devices will be the next generation of Core and Pentium Gold Chromebooks that will be the successors to devices such as the Acer Chromebook Spin 13, HP Chromebook X360 14 and every other device built on the ‘Nami’ baseboard. On the lower end of the Intel chipset spectrum, Gemini Lake is the current family powering “budget” Chromebooks in EDU and consumer markets. Gemini Lake is the much-appreciated replacement of the lack-luster Apollo Lake chips that replaced the aging Braswell line of Atom processors from Intel.
Now, Gemini Lake Chromebooks are still being pumped out by manufacturers by the truckload and I would expect that we’ll see more devices next year built on the platform. However, developers are already preparing Chrome OS to usher in Intel’s next generation of low-powered Chromebooks. There isn’t a lot of information out there about Jasper Lake but it is rumored to use Intel’s latest 10nm process and will possibly bridge the gap between Gemini Lake and the upcoming Elkhart Lake chipset.
depthcharge: Add Jasperlake SoC support
Adding soc driver for Intel Jasperlake SoC for depthcharge. Added power ops for Jasperlake
Chromium Repository
Like other upcoming devices, the new Jasper Lake Chromebooks will use the newly released 5.4 Linux kernel which appears to be the standard from Chrome OS moving forward. With no official roadmap from Intel, it’s nearly impossible to devise what advantages Jasper Lake will offer over its Gemini Lake predecessor but we’re crossing our fingers that it will continue to push the standard of performance up to a new level for Chrome OS. I wouldn’t expect to see any Jasper Lake devices before late 2020 but we’ll be keeping a close watch to see when the first actual devices begin development.
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Source: Chromium Repository
