Meet the Kompanio 1380, coming in the near future
MediaTek recently started upping its silicon game. While the company has been known for its midrange, affordable chips for the past few years, 2022 was the year it decided to dive head into the flagship game with the MediaTek Dimensity 9000. And, judging by leaked benchmarks, that could be competitive against the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 and Exynos 2200. But MediaTek is not stopping there. The company is also preparing a new chip for “premium Chromebooks” called the Kompanio 1380, coming with promises of high performance and low power consumption.
If you’ve looked at recent (mostly lower-end) Chromebooks, you might’ve found that a lot of them are powered by MediaTek chipsets. The company is one of the biggest chip makers in the Chromebook space, but so far, its success has remained mostly confined to the budget ecosystem. With the Kompanio 1380, MediaTek is looking to expand into higher-end ones, like the new version of the Acer Chromebook Spin 513 — announced a few weeks back with a $600 price point and the new Kompanio 1380. That’s… not usually the order these announcements follow.
The Kompanio 1380 is an octa-core CPU with four high-performance ARM Cortex-A78 cores running at clock speeds of up to 3GHz. These ain’t the really big Cortex-X1 or Cortex-X2 cores, but they’re still pretty good — and, importantly, they use a lot less power. It’s also built in a 6nm process — not as bleeding-edge as the company’s Dimensity 9000 is a 4nm part, but still competitive.
MediaTek says that gamers can look forward to the ARM Mali-G57’s five-core performance, plus perks like AV1 hardware decode, support for big external displays (two 4K 60Hz or one 4K 60 and two 4K 30), and quad-channel 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM. It also supports Wi-Fi 6/6E and Bluetooth 5.
In a lot of ways, the Kompanio 1380 resembles Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3. Qualcomm called that “entry-tier” while MediaTek is marketing the new Kompanio as “premium,” and that speaks to a difference in approach: Qualcomm’s hardware goes up from there with things like the 8cx Gen 3 destined for big-boy Windows PCs. But for MediaTek’s Chromebook goals, it is premium, sitting just above the prior Kompanio 1300T.
The Acer Chromebook Spin 513, the first device to launch with this CPU, will land in the market in June, so if you’re looking for your next premium Chromebook and you want to give MediaTek a chance, be on the lookout for it and other Kompanio 1380-equipped systems.
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