Another NVIDIA GPU-equipped Chromebook is in the works

Well, that makes two. I’m unsure how many other Chromebooks we’ll see hit the development cycle with NVIDIA GPUs inside, but if you told me just a few years ago that we’d have even one, I wouldn’t have believed you. Yet, here we are with evidence of a second Chromebook in the works that will come packing a big GPU upgrade on the inside, signalling a continued effort to get Steam games up and running smoothly on Chromebooks.

Now, you may be looking at the above commit from the Chromium Repositories and be wondering exactly how we know ‘Hades’ will come with a NVIDIA GPU. Well, the clue is all in the description, saying this brand new development board is being copied directly from an already-in-development device with the code name ‘Agah’.

If you’re around here quite a bit, you’ll likely remember our report on ‘Agah’ from about 8 months ago that clearly paved the way for us to finally see work starting on Chromebooks with upgraded GPUs inside. More specifically, those GPUs are NVIDIA-made, so that makes it even more interesting if you ask me. While ‘Agah’ seems to have ties to HP, we’re not totally clear on who is behind ‘Hades’ for the time being.

Interestingly enough, though ‘Hades’ is being copied from ‘Agah’ and looks to be based on 12th-gen Intel silicon, there are also references to ‘Hades’ being built on the 13th-gen Raptor Lake platform as well. This isn’t too odd since Alder Lake and Raptor Lake both use the outgoing 10nm process Intel has moved on from, so the change from one generation to the next isn’t that big of a difference.

Regardless of whether or not ‘Hades’ shows up with 12th or 13th-gen processors from Intel, the bigger story is that we should see it paired with an NVIDIA GPU of some sort. What we’ll get is very much still up in the air, but I’m hopeful that we’ll see a few Chromebooks totally capable of running high-end Steam games at some point in the future. The Steam container still has some cleanup work ahead of it and we’re not sure when we’ll see these Chromebooks, but when it all comes together, it will surely mark a new chapter in the ever-evolving Chromebook story, and that part is pretty exciting!