MediaTek details new high-end Google Chromebook chip
MediaTek has fully unveiled a new high-end Google Chromebook chip, the Kompanio 1380.
The company revealed that the Kompanio 1380 would be powering the new Acer Chromebook Spin 513 at CES in early January, but now we’ve received the full lowdown on the chip courtesy of a blog post.
MediaTek describes the 6nm Kompanio 1380 as a “flagship-grade SoC designed to power Premium Chromebook experience.” It’s said to feature an “incredibly high performance design” that’s also “extremely power efficient”.
The chip includes an octa-core CPU that includes four Arm Cortex-A78 cores for high-end tasks and four Arm Cortex-A55 chips for less power-intensive activities.
This is backed by a five-core Arm-Mali G57 GPU and support for quad-channel 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM. Bluetooth 5 and Wi-Fi 6 are supported.
On the AI front, it’s claimed that the integrated MediaTek APU 3.0 provides eight times more performance than so-called “mainstream Chromebook chips”. MediaTek suggests a range of speech and image recognition applications that could benefit from this boost, as well as real-time Google AR Core performance.
When it comes to display support, the MediaTek Kompanio 1380 can run up to two 4K UHD displays at 60Hz, or two 2.5K displays at 120Hz, simultaneously.
As mentioned at the outset, the chip is set to debut in the Acer Chromebook Spin 513 this April. We called last year’s model “one of the best Chromebooks on the market today” in our 9 out of 10 review.
That Chromebook was notable for bringing one of the first marriages between ChromeOS and an Arm-based processor in the shape of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7c. By the sounds of it, MediaTek’s Kompanio 1380 could take performance to the next level.