MediaTek has announced a new flagship Kompanio Ultra chipset for Chromebook Plus devices that promises to lift the Google-powered notebooks into previously uncharted territory in terms of power and AI capabilities.
The new 3nm chip sit above the current Komanio 800 series powering the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus, and the mid-range Kompanio 500 processors.
MediaTek says is new chipset can offer industry-leading performance that’ll bring on-device agentic AI to Chromebook Plus devices. MediaTek is also promising high-quality on-device AI image and video generation from the chip with the first device due later this year.
The Kompanio Ultra will also unlock the best from Google’s forthcoming announcements pertaining to new Gemini for Chromebook, which MediaTek says Google will reveal in May (presumably at Google I/O).
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All of this AI goodness is thanks to the Ultra’s MediaTek NPU 890 which offers 50 TOPS, rivalling some of the top AI PCs currently on the market, according to MediaTek. It offers offers 5x more TOPS than an Intel Core Ultra 5 125U running on ChromeOS.
MediaTek continues the comparisons with Intel’s chip when judging the 8-core CPU performance. The single-thread performance beats Intel’s Ultra 5 CPU by 18% while using 50% less power, the company says. That’s down to a single Arm Cortex X925 core deployed to do the heavy lifting. Multi-thread performance is up to 40% faster using 30% less power than the same Intel chip.
As for graphics, it’s a similar tale. On average, you’re going to achieve 40% better graphics performance. On certain native Android games running on Chromebook the improvement is far more pronounced, MediaTek claims. Minecraft, for instance, offers a frame rate 250% better than on a device running the Intel chip. Ray tracing is possible too.
Battery life goes further than before. The all-day battery life lasts 29% longer than a Chromebook running the Core 5 Ultra 115 U, according to the company’s own stats. And you can also add a pair of 4K external displays and benefit from a 60Hz refresh rate.
The chip will be available later this year on new Chromebook Plus and, again, we can expect to hear from on this from both Google and MediaTek’s laptop manufacturing partners in the months to come.
A new dawn for Chromebooks?
The potential of this chip is interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly because it’s far beyond what’s traditionally been expected of Chromebook devices compared to Windows and Mac rivals.
If I were to speculate it’d appear that Google, MediaTek and perhaps some of the best Chromebook manufacturers are planning on lifting ChromeOS-powered devices into the top tier when it comes to power and AI performance.
