Google is reportedly pushing its hardware partners to undertake development of Chromebooks based on high-performance ARM SoCs (systems on chips). There's talk of at least one major OEM working on a Chromebook that runs NVIDIA's Tegra 4 chip, which combines a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU clocked at 1.90 GHz, with GeForce ULV graphics. The chip is capable of handling Android tablets with display resolutions as high as 2560 x 1600 pixels, and so we expect it to perform fairly well with Chrome OS. Chromebooks with Tegra 4 will be backed by 2 GB of system memory, as Cortex-A15 is still a 32-bit CPU architecture.

In related news, there's also talk of Chromebooks running Intel's "Bay Trail" Atom SoCs, which Intel originally developed for handhelds such as premium smartphones and tablets. Leaked Chrome OS source code betrayed a Chromebook running Intel's Atom E3845 SoC, which combines a quad-core x86-64 CPU clocked at 1.91 GHz, with 2 MB of L3 cache. Chromebooks are designed for people who spend most of their notebook usage on a web-browser, and other Internet communication tools (such as IMs, web apps, etc.). Since software is incompatible between Chrome OS and Windows, it gives Google a degree of freedom to constantly evolve its hardware without bothering about machine-architecture changes.