Google Confirms Faster Chromebooks And We See 64bit Chrome OS In The Making

Written on February 20, 2012 in news

Ever thought that your Chromebook needs more processing power? A better chip and some extra RAM? Looks like we are going in that direction.

“We remain very excited about Chromebooks. We got a lot of positive feedback, and we are really looking forward to the next generation of Chromebooks,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, in an interview with CNET yesterday. “We will improve on the dimensions of speed, simplicity, and security.”

64 Bit Chrome OS

That sounds more like a push on hardware changes to me. Because, we have started noticing lot of working happening around 64bit version of Chrome OS. If you look here, you will see a lot of stuff happening around the 64bit architecture.

Updated Thanks to Arthur: Intel’s Atom processors are capable to run 64 bit Operating Systems so all the current Chromebooks are fully capable of running a 64-bit Chrome OS. Though there wouldn’t be much of an advantage because the current processors and chipsets only support 2 gigs of RAM, while the biggest advantage of using a 64-bit OS is the ability to use >4 gigs of RAM

The main advantage of 64 bit operating systems is being able to use 4GB+ of ram. This will help some with Chrome’s performance, since it is fairly memory hungry, especially with multiple tabs/extensions.

Update from Steven Holms: Unfortunately, it won’t help other performance issues in Chrome OS, like graphics and processing performance. Another issue is that 64bit systems aren’t very useful on anything under 4GB, since they generally use more overhead than typical 32bit systems.

This upgrade of both software and hardware will push Chromebooks to a new level, addressing the performance concerns we heard about both the Cr48 and commercial chromebooks from Samsung and Acer. We will see faster boot times, better video and gaming and also less crashes and lags.

Will this affect the price?

Update : How To You Make a 64bit Chrome OS Build?

via Chromium Project Docs

A 64-bit version of Chromium can be built on Linux by using the -Dtarget_arch=x64 flag on the GYP build system. (This is the default on 64-bit Linux systems.)

The 64-bit version of the V8 JavaScript engine used by Chromium can be built separately using the –arch=x64 flag in v8′s Scons build system. This works on both the Linux and Mac OS X platforms.

Neither Chromium nor V8 has a 64-bit version on the Windows platform right now. However, Chrome does run on 64-bit Windows as a 32-bit application. V8 should only need a small number of changes to build on the Windows platform.

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Google Confirms Faster Chromebooks And We See 64bit Chrome OS In The Making is a post from: Chrome Story – Google Chrome OS Tips Blog