‘Atlas’ Chromebook with 4K display, 8GB RAM, Assistant button, & backlit keyboard is coming

There are a lot of different Chromebooks in the works right now, and any one of them could be the upcoming Pixelbook 2018 edition. We've narrowed it down to three separate boards: Nocturne, Atlas, and Cheza. That's in order of what we perceived to be the likelihood, but the Atlas Chromebook has gotten a whole lot more interesting recently. Not only does it have a 4K display, but it also has a Kaby Lake CPU and no SD card support, 8GB of RAM, a Google Assistant button, and a backlit keyboard as well.

That's a lot of information to take in at once. So where did we find out this information? Well, we already knew about the 4K display and the CPU and SD card support, but the other claims are taken from the Chromium Gerrit.

Atlas has 8GB of RAM

ChromeUnboxed did some digging and discovered that Atlas was using NT6CL256T32CM-H1 memory. This particular RAM chip is an 8GB LPDDR3 RAM module. That's a lot of RAM for a Chromebook, but interestingly, 8GB of RAM is the lowest amount of RAM last year's Pixelbook had. Other Chromebooks have less RAM than that. It does definitely make you wonder, as that's a lot of RAM for a simple device like a Chromebook.

Atlas has a dedicated Google Assistant key

What really backs up Atlas being the next Pixelbook is the inclusion of a dedicated Google Assistant key on the keyboard as discovered also by ChromeUnboxed. The Pixelbook set out to create its own keyboard layout that other manufacturers would hopefully adopt. Not one did, but Atlas interestingly references that same layout in a commit. Delving deeper reveals that a dedicated Google Assistant key is also included.

Atlas has a backlit keyboard

Now, here's some information discovered by us. Just like Nocturne, Atlas also has a backlit keyboard. Backlit keyboards have a number of uses, including typing in the dark and improving the aesthetics of a device. They're often a feature of more premium devices, as they prevent you from fumbling for keys in the dark.

Atlas – the next Pixelbook?

While obviously there isn't enough information yet to go off of, this Chromebook could very well be the next Pixelbook. The inclusion of 8GB of RAM again combined with no SD card slot and a dedicated Assistant key seems to suggest that to be the case, anyway. What do you think?

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