A new MediaTek MT8189 baseboard joins the upcoming ARM Chromebook party

We’ve been tracking the development of ‘Skywalker’, the baseboard for MediaTek’s upcoming MT8189 chip, and its absolutely-massive family of eight offshoot devices for a little while now. The sheer volume of upcoming devices from one baseboard is impressive, and it makes me incredibly excited for the future of ARM-powered Chromebooks in general.

But the story just got another wrinkle. As I was digging through the repositories just this morning, I uncovered evidence of not just another variant board, but an entirely new, second reference board for the MT8189. Meet ‘Jedi’.

‘Jedi’ and ‘Padme’

To be clear, ‘Jedi’ isn’t just another device in the ‘Skywalker’ family; it’s a whole new baseboard on its own. This means that Google and MediaTek have developed two distinct reference designs for Chromebooks that will be built on the same MT8189 SoC. While we don’t yet know the exact distinctions between ‘Skywalker’ and ‘Jedi’, the fact that a second, parallel development platform exists strongly implies it will serve a different purpose or form factor.

And ‘Jedi’ isn’t arriving alone. The commits show that it has already spawned its first variant board, codenamed ‘Padme’. The Star Wars theme is clearly strong with this new generation of ARM-powered Chromebooks.

The MT8189 is blowing up

Let’s just take a step back and look at the numbers. For a single, still-unnamed MediaTek chip, we now have:

• Two distinct baseboards (‘Skywalker’ and ‘Jedi’)
• A combined total of nine unique devices in active development (‘Skywalker’s eight, plus ‘Jedi’s ‘Padme’)

This level of pre-release hardware development is something we’ve not seen before for an ARM SoC in the ChromeOS ecosystem. It’s an undeniable signal of a massive, coordinated push from Google, MediaTek, and a wide array of manufacturing partners.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that we’re seeing the foundation being laid for a big wave of new Chromebooks aimed squarely at the education market. With this much activity, I fully expect to see a flood of new, affordable, and efficient EDU devices based on the MT8189 unveiled at the big tech shows early next year, like CES 2026 and BETT 2026.