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As of late, it looks like Google, Intel and hardware manufacturers are working hard to get Chrome OS on to a similar roadmap as other operating systems. With two new devices already on board with Project Athena, it’s an exciting time for Chrome OS fans as devices are now enjoying the same current-gen internals as many of their Windows counterparts. Apart from the new Comet Lake devices, we are already seeing Gemini Lake-R Chromebooks roll out alongside Windows laptops for the EDU market.
For future devices, Chrome OS developers have already laid the groundwork for the yet-unannounced 10nm Jasper Lake processors from Intel. While this comes as no surprise, we are now getting a first look at actual Jasper Lake devices in development. For you old-school Nintendo fans, you’re going to love this new lineup of code names for the Jasper Lake devices.
Meet Dedede
In case you’re unfamiliar, King Dedede is the arch-rival of Kirby, the loveable puffball that devours anything and everything you can imagine. For our purposes, ‘Dedede’ appears to be the first Chromebook in development to be powered by the Gemini Lake-R successor. While there isn’t much to glean at this point, we do know that ‘Dedede’ will use the newer 5.4 Linux kernel based on previous commits. We also see that the Jasper Lake device will support NVMe which could be a first for low-powered Atom-level Chromebooks.
With Jasper Lake still “unofficial,” we don’t have clock speeds, benchmarks or any other specs to give us insight into the performance of these chips. However, if Intel has smoothed out the bumps in their 10nm process, the improvements in this next generation of processors could be greater than the ones we saw when Apollo Lake was abandoned in favor of Gemini Lake. It is possible that ‘Dedede’ is a reference device that will be the base for other devices and we’ve already unearthed a second Chromebook that branched off of it. ‘WaddleDoo‘, also a Kirby character, began development in early January and was cloned from ‘Dedede’. With Gemini Lake-R being such a minor refresh, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing the Jasper Lake devices popping up in Q3/Q4 of this year and that’s some exciting news.
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Source: Chromium Repository
