Two new Snapdragon SC7280 Chromebook boards enter development

While we’re still in the speculation phase about what chip the SC7280 actually is, it doesn’t mean that development isn’t already cruising along on new boards housing the mysterious silicon from Qualcomm. I still feel confident that the SC7280 is simply a newer generation of the Snapdragon 7c we’ll soon see available inside a few devices in the coming weeks, but we don’t know exactly what this new chip will consist of and we don’t know what sort of cores will be powering it.

What we do know, however, is the fact that there are two new development boards in the Chromium Gerrit that are based on this new chip and already beginning development. Their names? ‘Herobrine’ and ‘Senor’. From the looks of the work already being done, it would seem ‘Herobrine’ is going to be the unibuild baseboard for the new SC7280 chip (like ‘Kukui’ is the basis for devices like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet, Lenovo Chromebook 10e, etc.). This leaves ‘Senor’ as an offshoot of that unibuild baseboard for the moment, but all this can change over time.

It would stand to reason that much of what has already been established for the upcoming Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks (like my favorite of the bunch, ‘Coachz’) will carry over to this chipset and development should progress quite a bit quicker than it has for Snapdragon-powered Chromebooks thus far. After all, we started dreaming of Qualcomm Chromebooks all the way back in December of 2017, so the work thus far has taken considerable time to occur. We’d hope that with Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks nearly ready for public consumption, these new SC7280 Chrome OS devices will come to fruition in a more timely manner. Stay tuned as always, we’ll share when we learn more.