MediaTek’s ‘Ultra’ Chromebook chips promise killer Minecraft power

MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra as the company’s premium Chromebook processor on Wednesday, predicting that it will easily offer the highest Minecraft performance of any Chromebook chip while bringing AI to the platform, too.

Essentially, MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra to help answer the question: Which Chromebook should I buy?

Besides Google’s own Chromebook Plus brand, there aren’t too many answers. Instead, the list of Chromebooks is a hodgepodge of various processors, including the Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core processors; AMD’s A-series and Ryzen chips, and Arm processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon and the existing MediaTek Kompanio 500 and 800 series. Google launched the Chromebook Plus specification to help clarify matters, but it certainly doesn’t help to differentiate the performance each chip can offer. MediaTek isn’t that well known, either.

All of that sparked the need for a MediaTek “Ultra” brand, said Adam King, the vice president and general manager of computing and multimedia business for MediaTek, in a conference call with reporters. Around 2021, MediaTek tried the Kompanio 1000 chip, which fizzled.

“We decided, if we were going to try again, we would,” King said. “We wouldn’t hold anything back. We would put the absolute best that we could out there, even knowing that it might not necessarily drive tremendous volume.”

What’s in the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra?

The Kompanio Ultra is an 8-core Arm CPU, on a 3nm process technology. It’s based upon a single Arm Cortex 3.62GHz X925 ultraperformance core, along with three Arm Cortex X4 performance cores and four Arm Cortex A720 efficiency cores. Those cores are paired with an 11-core Immortalis-G925 GPU that can perform ray tracing and output to three 4K displays at 60Hz while performing 10-bit 4K60 video encoding and decoding using the HEVC/AVC codecs. It uses an undisclosed amount of LPDDR5X memory. The chip supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0.

MediaTek

More importantly, the Ultra chip includes an NPU capable of 50 TOPS, leaving it able to perform whatever NPU-centric functions a Chromebook can throw at it. AI capabilities have pretty much ignored the Chromebook entirely, save for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.

Executives claimed that the Kompanio Ultra 910, the first chip in MediaTek’s new product class, could easily outperform Intel’s leader, Intel Core Ultra 5 115U and 125U, in the Chromebook space. The Ultra offers 18 percent faster single-thread performance and 40 percent more multi-thread performance, respectively.

More importantly, the Ultra 910 can deliver 250 percent the frame rate of the 125U while playing Minecraft, MediaTek executives said, a key metric for elementary-school age kids. If you’re looking for the best Minecraft or Roblox Chromebook for your kids, you might want one with a Kompanio Ultra chip inside it.

Users don’t need to trade off performance for battery life, either; MediaTek claims that the chip will deliver 20 hours of battery life on a 60Wh battery.

Are Kompanio PCs coming?

In fact, if there’s one area that’s been ignored within Chromebooks, it’s AI. King said that it’s likely that Google will address this in its May event, Google I/O. (Could Google announce a Chromebook Ultra then?)

MediaTek executives said that the Kompanio Ultra won’t appear in Windows on Arm PCs, however, nor on tablets. So while we still expect MediaTek to eventually challenge Qualcomm in PCs, that will have to wait for another day…although that day doesn’t appear that far off, either.