Gaming Chromebooks could be on their way
If gaming phones don’t sound outlandish enough, gaming Chromebooks will turn some heads. These machines are hooked up with minimal specs and a svelte operating system, so gaming never seemed like it would ever be a priority. These devices populate schools and mostly access Chrome and Android apps. However, based on some code found in the Chrome OS code, it seems that they’re going to be used for gaming. We can tell a lot about what a company is going to do by what’s buried in the code. In Chrome OS, the folks at 9To5Google were able to find something interesting. There’s a new flag in the software: #enable-rgb-keyboard. If “RGB keyboard” seems familiar, think of literally ANY Twitch streamer ever. This could mean that there’s a Chromebook targeted at gamers in the pipeline.
We don’t have any news on devices just yet
Unfortunately, we don’t have any leaks or rumors about an actual device that will use this flag. Since multiple manufacturers build Chromebooks, we don’t have one company to point our fingers at. We can only wait until a company or leaker spills the beans. While we don’t have any information on a device, the subject of gaming Chromebooks has been brought up in the past. Two major chip manufacturers, NVIDIA and MediaTek, were (are) working on bringing some powerful gaming capabilities to Chromebooks. Last year, the two companies announced that they were working to bring NVIDIA’s GPU technology to an ARM-based MediaTek chipset. This partnership would be able to bring features like ray tracing to Chromebooks. While that sounds weird, Chromebooks have become pretty powerful devices over the years. If a person buys a decently powerful one for work purposes, that person could then transition to gaming without spending a mountain of money on a gaming laptop.
There’s another chip manufacturer partnership that aims to bring ray tracing to a weaker gaming platform
Samsung just unveiled its newest chipset, the Exynos 2200. The company noted that it partnered with AMD to develop the Xclipse GPU. Both companies promise that this chip will be able to bring ray tracing to mobile phones. As bold of a claim as that is, it’s still interesting to see in action. Since we don’t have any information on when we’ll see gaming Chromebooks, it might be a while before we see any hit the shelves. Only time will tell.
