A recently spotted commit to the Chromium Gerrit seems to suggest that a long-rumored Snapdragon-powered Chromebook, codenamed “Cheza,” has finally entered prototyping. The code, first spotted by XDA Developers, was initially posted under the title ‘Cheza, sweetberry: Cheza proto 1 power map.’ That would suggest that the first of four stages testing phases were underway which are required before a Chromebook can enter mass production. More specifically, that indicated that power level testing was underway for the mapping of various ports to be used by components on the device’s board. That could take anywhere from a month to several months to complete, followed by more in-depth testing of components. However, the title has since been changed, following comments on the commit suggesting that the team wants to keep the timeline under wraps and out of public view. To that end, the title has been reworked and will use the ‘rev 1’ and ‘rev 2’ markup moving forward, rather than the more widely understood engineering terms.
Depending on how much progress has been made since the commit was initially posted, there are three more steps before mass production can begin. Those are engineering validation, design validation, and production validation tests. The first of those steps is a multi-stage process which validates and settles the hardware which will be used in the final product. The second will prepare the overall design of that hardware for production processes. Finally, the third will look for problems in the production process itself. Completion of those will certify that Cheza can be mass produced and shipped out but this Chromebook will likely be announced as early as the design validation stage since that should finalize any major design decisions.
As to the Chromebook itself, there’s not much to be gleaned from the latest commit. Cheza is expected to be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 SoC and an “always-on” design. That could imply a Chrome OS device that can be connected at all times via LTE. Beyond that, test documentation has shown the tests are being conducted with a 2560 x 1440 resolution display and two USB Type-C ports. Those won’t necessarily be included in the finished design and the possibilities on offer from the octa-core mobile chipset are too varied to reliably guess at.
