First signs of an Intel Core Ultra Chromebox emerge with connections to HP

One of the segments of ChromeOS devices that continues to plug along without drawing too much attention to itself is the humble-but-powerful Chromebox. These devices don’t get a ton of press mainly because they are the most distilled, simple expressions of ChromeOS you can buy. As their name suggests, Chromeboxes are simple devices that house the necessary bits to run ChromeOS and rely on you – the user – to add in the display and I/O bits needed to get some work done.

Because of this nature, Chromeboxes tend to be considerably cheaper than Chromebooks for the same internal hardware. And if you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. With a Chromebox, you’re not paying for the materials and engineering that go into a hinge, screen, keyboard, trackpad and speakers. Instead, manufacturers can drop in a simple motherboard, some ports, and you are off and running.

A new lineup of Chromeboxes on the way

For today, we’ve stumbled upon evidence of a particular Chromebox in development along with the main baseboard we think these new Chromeboxes will all be based upon. Say hello to the main development board ‘Ovis’ and at least one new Chromebox we expect to come from HP in ‘Deku’:

As you can see in that first file, ‘Ovis’ has been added and is explicitly reporting no built-in screen. This, of course, is a dead giveaway that ‘Ovis’ is a Chromebox. ‘Brask’ was the previous development board for 12th-gen Intel Chromeboxes, and as we’ve seen time and again, these devices tend to skip a generation. We’ll likely not see any 13th-gen Intel Chromeboxes, but these new 14th-gen Core Ultra Chromeboxes should all spawn from this new ‘Ovis’ board.

Why ‘Deku’ could be from HP

Now, moving on to ‘Deku’, you can see in the commit above that this board is based on the ‘Ovis’ reference board. In addition, we found another commit adding a buzzer to ‘Deku’, further solidifying its state as a Chromebox. A buzzer is a simple speaker that allows the device to emits beeps that are needed to signal things like Developer Mode being turned on.

In addition, for many of the commits for ‘Deku’, I also noticed a constant email attached to them. kevin.chiu@quanta.corp-partner.google.com is clearly a Quanta email address, and that could mean all sorts of things. But in this case, Kevin Chiu appears on lots and lots of HP devices and many of the commits specifically for HP’s last Chromebox: code named ‘Gladios’.

While this isn’t a 100% guarantee of anything, it gives me very strong suspicions that ‘Deku’ will be an HP product. And that means we should also be on the lookout for similar ‘Ovis’-based Chromeboxes from the usual suspects Acer, ASUS and CTL as well. This is definitely the time of year where Chromeboxes begin to quietly show up, so we’ll be on the lookout. There likely won’t be any big announcement or even a huge press release, but it is nice to know a new fleet of Chromeboxes is on the way.