MediaTek is bringing out a new chip for Chromebooks that blurs the boundary with Copilot+ PCs, sporting an 8-core CPU cluster and a neural processing unit (NPU) rated at 50 TOPS.
The Taiwanese chipmaker says its Kompanio Ultra 910 system-on-chip (SoC) is intended to bring on-device AI capabilities and computing performance to Chromebook Plus devices.
Kompanio Ultra 910
It features what MediaTek calls an "All Big Core" CPU cluster, comprising all Arm-designed cores. There's a performance Cortex-X925 core clocked at up to 3.62 GHz, 3x Cortex-X4, and 4x Cortex-A720 cores.
Also on board is an Arm Immortalis G925 GPU and Wi-Fi 7 support, but it is the NPU that the company claims sets this latest silicon apart from other Chromebook processors. MediaTek's literature says it will support generative AI models and AI Agents, providing higher speed and greater power efficiency by offloading workloads from the CPU and GPU.
Users can expect real-time task automation, personalized computing, AI-enhanced workflows, and supposedly still enjoy an all-day battery life, according to Mediatek.
MediaTek says it worked with Google to support the newest Chromebook Plus devices, and the models powered by the Kompanio Ultra chip will be available "in the coming months."
Those models will have a specification that seems not far removed from some Arm-based Copilot+ PCs. At the CES show in January, rival chipmaker Qualcomm talked up the Snapdragon X platform which has an 8-core CPU and a 45 TOPS NPU, and is expected to power Windows Copilot+ PCs in the $600 range.
Given that some Chromebook Plus models already cost this much, devices based on Kompanio Ultra 910 are likely to be going head-to-head with Windows laptops - albeit Arm-based designs that can't run the full corpus of Windows applications. Quite a departure from the image of Chromebooks as the "cheap-and-cheerful" choice of students everywhere.
And if you were questioning why anyone in the market for a Chromebook would want AI capabilities, that boat has already sailed; generative AI features were added to the Chromebook Plus platform by Google last year, including its Gemini chatbot. ®