ASUS Announces the First Meteor Lake-Based Chromebook Plus

While the PC market is hoping that so-called “AI PCs” are the future, the NPUs in Intel’s new Meteor Lake chipsets aren’t just for PCs: ASUS has also announced the first Meteor Lake-based Chromebook Plus, bringing the power of AI to this simpler and less expensive computing platform.

“ASUS ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus is the first Chromebook to feature the all-new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor to supercharge business and personal productivity — and the first Expert-series Chromebook Plus from ASUS,” the ASUS press release explains. “ASUS ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus is exquisitely engineered to elevate the competitive edge for organizations of all sizes, with 2X the power, speed, memory and storage of other devices, and a high-definition camera and display, empowering companies and colleagues to do their best work.”

While it’s not clear which Intel Core Ultra 7 processor(s) power this Chromebook Plus, it features 16 GB of fast LPDDR5x (6400 MHz) and 512 GB of PCI Express M.2 SSD storage. It’s a traditional laptop form factor device with a 14-inch 16:10 touchscreen display at WQXGA (2560 x 1600) resolution that delivers 500 nits of brightness and 100 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. It’s also thin (0.67 inches) and light (2.9 pounds) for its size.

The CX54 includes an 8 MP user-facing webcam that uses pixel binning and Google’s machine learning (ML) HDRnet technology to improve video quality in 1080p and higher resolution modes. It provides two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, a microSD card slot, and an HDMI 2.1 port, and can connect to up to three external 4K displays. And its fingerprint reader is backed by the Google Titan C2 security chip. The CX54 can also be configured with Chrome Enterprise.

It’s not clear from the announcement when the CX54 will ship or what the pricing will be, but I’m guessing it’s a U-series design, so probably early 2024. You can learn more about the Enterprise version on the ASUS website.