‘Felino’, the first Intel Panther Lake Chromebook device emerges from Acer

At the absolute tail-end of 2024 – quite literally December 31st – I wrote a post about the first rumblings of Intel’s latest processors (code-named Panther Lake) being utilized in a new Chromebook baseboard. That board’s name is ‘Fatcat’, and development has been obviously continuing ever since. Side note: has there ever been a more-apt Chromebook baseboard name than ‘Fatcat’ for Panther Lake?

Anyway, we haven’t seen much more on that front of late. The darling of the upcoming Chromebook world is clearly the MediaTek MT8196 and the ‘Navi’ and ‘Hylia’ development boards that house it. This SoC looks to be wildly powerful and will likely arrive in the first half of 2025 as the most powerful overall Chromebook processor on the market. And it’s ARM. The reason for the hype is very real.

However, there’s a chance that with Panther Lake, Intel could take back the #1 spot as the fastest Chromebook processor on the market a bit later in 2025. We don’t know until both of these SoCs are out and about in actual Chromebooks, but Intel’s latest silicon sounds pretty exciting and should make for really compelling internals for upcoming devices.

‘Felino’ looks to be coming from Acer

From the looks of the ongoing work on the first actual device board spawned from ‘Fatcat’ that we’ve found – ‘Felino’ – it would seem that Acer is the first in line to get a Chromebook into development with one of the new Panther Lake processors inside. ‘Felino’ has only been in the works since November, so there’s a lot of development yet to be done; but we can get a good feel for the manufacturer from the batteries being tested.

A quick Google search for “lges ap22a8n battery” and “smp ap23b7q battery” reveals a couple power sources listed as Acer replacement batteries for various devices. While not a 100% marker that ‘Felino’ is an Acer device, this sort of clue has been completely reliable in the past.

And I’m not one bit surprised by it. At the moment, we can’t tell exactly which device this might be, but my hope is on a new Spin 714 model. I’ve said it over and over again, but Acer has really honed in their Spin 714 lineup and each year iterates on the last to create a dependably-great Chromebook each time.

However, ‘Felino’ could just as easily be a new Chromebook Plus 515 or something similar. Acer generally stays right up on the curve when it comes to new device releases that line up with the latest from Intel, so I’d expect this next generation to be no different.

As always, we’ll keep on digging around to find more information out about ‘Felino’ and we’ll be keeping a close eye for what will without doubt be the beginning of the next generation of Intel-powered Chromebooks coming our way. Stay tuned.