MediaTek has added a premium tier to its Chromebook-processor family. The first of these Kompanio Ultra chips, the 910, will appear later this year in Chromebook Plus devices. The processor has the same specs as the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 but doesn’t integrate a 5G modem.
The company compares the eight-core Kompanio Ultra 910 with the Intel Core Ultra 5 125U (Meteor Lake) that launched in 4Q23 and features a mixture of Intel’s performance and efficiency CPUs. MediaTek claims 18% greater peak single-thread and 40% greater multithread performance while requiring much less power. The power advantage is especially important for Chromebooks, which often must run on battery for an entire school day (or longer if inadvertently not charged overnight).
The superior performance helps Google differentiate Plus Chromebooks from the regular kind. Their added performance and features engage users more, which could help Google transcend base models’ shlocky reputation and penetrate the enterprise market. A Chromebook Plus could compete with thin clients, which companies use in place of PCs to save money and increase security.
The Chromebook market is among the few where Arm and x86 processors directly compete. Because most Chromebook applications are web-based, software compatibility for these personal computers isn’t critical. To the extent that it matters, Arm has the advantage of better compatibility with the Android apps the devices can run. Intel’s processors may have offered better performance, but that’s no longer the case. Their main advantage may be to OEMs because the big chipmaker has marketing schemes that reward customers for buying more processors.
The ability to successfully position the Kompanio Ultra 910 against a low-end (but not bottom-tier) Intel processor reflects positively on Arm Cortex-X925 and other licensed cores that MediaTek employs in the processor. Once the undisputed performance champion, Intel no longer has a significant advantage. Even software-ecosystem differences are diminishing but remain a bulwark against a wave of Arm-based PCs. That wave, however, is coming. The Kompanio Ultra 910 indicates MediaTek has the technology to compete for Windows-PC sockets.