The new Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE will be 13th-gen Intel powered

More pieces are falling into place with the upcoming Acer Chromebook Plus 516 GE, and I couldn’t be more excited for it. The fact that it already appears in the official Omaha servers for ChromeOS updates is enough to tell me this one is just around the corner, but I’m anticipating the arrival of this hopeful sequel so much that I can’t stop trying to find details about it.

The other day, I suggested a few upgrades over the original version that I’d love to see, and I’ve already found evidence that one of those changes is definitely in the works. With a brighter backlight on the keyboard definitely in the works, we’ll be able to (hopefully) better enjoy all those RGB colors in multiple lighting environments this time around. I also speculated that we’d likely (not definitely) see Acer upgrade to a 13th-gen Raptor Lake Intel processor for the Plus version of the 516 GE, and that is now confirmed, too.

As you can see in the commit above (there are many other references to this sort of thing in the Chromium Repositories), a power limit value is being set for a Raptor Lake (a.k.a. 13th-gen Intel) CPU in the ‘Brya’ board variant ‘Osiris’. Again, ‘Osiris’ is the development board for the original and upcoming Plus model of the 516 GE, so this is clear evidence that the new Chromebook Plus 516 GE will come packing 13th-gen Intel on the inside. Most likely we’ll see the i5-1340P or i5-1350P to match up with the i5-1240P we saw in the original, but that’s only a guess for now.

Assuming most of this device stays similar, it’s great to already see an update to the processor, better keyboard backlighting, and likely a few other tweaks to what is easily my favorite Chromebook on the market right now. If the speakers get a boost and touch is added to the screen (without any of the other great qualities of that panel disappearing), I’ll be one happy camper. We should know more soon!