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Chromebooks Are Leveling Up With The New MediaTek Chip

MediaTek's Kompanio 1380 is its newest processor for Chromebooks, and it brings not only incredible performance but long-lasting battery life. Taiwan's MediaTek is one of the chip manufacturers making processors for Chromebooks, but its chips are usually found in budget and entry-level models. However, its recent product releases are now targeted at the mid-range and premium segments.

Just like Qualcomm chips, MediaTek chips are also based on the ARM architecture. While it is yet to join the Windows on ARM party, though it has signified its interest to do so, for now, its processors can also be found powering Android smartphones, tablets, eReaders, routers, smart speakers, and smart TVs. In the Chromebook space, it has to compete against big names such as Intel and AMD, in addition to Qualcomm.

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MediaTek revealed at a conference in 2021 that its Chromebook processors will now be placed in three groups, the Kompanio 500 for entry-level devices, the Kompanio 800 series for mid-range, and the Kompanio 1000 series for high-end/premium Chromebooks. The newly-announced Kompanio 1380 falls under the third category. The 6nm chip is made by TSMC and has eight cores. In an official press release, PC Tseng, the general manager of MediaTek's Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit, said the processor brings “next-level performance and extra-long battery life”. It also features “best-in-class multimedia and AI features, and smooth cloud gaming capabilities.”

The Kompanio 1380 a.k.a. MT8195T has four Cortex-A78 performance cores clocked at up to 3.0 GHz and four Cortex-A55 power efficiency cores with a 2.0 GHz clock speed. The GPU is the five-core Mali G57 and MediaTek has also included its APU 3.0 AI processing unit which will handle tasks such as speech and image recognition, live translation, and noise reduction in real-time. Unfortunately, there are no benchmark results yet, so there is no way to see how it compares to chips from competitors.

The chip also has support for AV1 hardware decoding, 7.1 surround sound, and up to three independent displays, two of which can be 4K60 HDR displays or 2.5K up to 120Hz. Other features are WiFi 6/6E, Bluetooth 5, GNSS, and support for eMMC, uFS, and NVMe storage types. While MediaTek has just announced the processor, it already made its debut in the Acer Chromebook Spin 513 announced at CES 2022.

The computer has a 13.5-inch 3:2 2256 x 1504 screen, a 360-degrees hinge that allows it to be folded back into tablet mode, up to 8GB of RAM, up to 128GB of storage, and a glass trackpad. It has a starting price of $599 and will be available in June 2022. Now that the chipset has been officially announced, we can expect to see it appear in more Chromebooks this year.

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Source: MediaTek



Source: Screenrant