New Chromebooks

The Samsung Chromebook 2 laptops aren’t yet available for purchase, but Samsung is starting to tout the new devices in order to build buzz. The company is using its Exynos 5 Octa chip to power the pair of laptops and says to expect 125 percent more performance over the prior model. The old Samsung Chromebook, debuting in 2012, uses Samsung’s older Exynos Dual chip.

Android Central noticed Samsung’s press release, which explains how the eight-core chip combines two pairs of four “big” cores and four “little” cores using the ARM architecture. The former are for more intensive computing while lighter processes are done on the latter cores, which can help save battery life.

A doubling of graphics and multimedia performance should help movie viewers. While the current Chromebook streams and plays videos from YouTube, Netflix and other services relatively well, there’s room for improvement. Occasional frame-drops, stutters and lags aren’t uncommon in videos on the original Samsung Chromebook. That device only had 2 GB of memory, while the new Chromebook 2 models will come with double the RAM, which will also help general performance.