A powerful MediaTek MT8196 Chromebook tablet looks to be in the works

We only just recently began the journey of the latest Chromebook tablet with the new Lenovo Chromebook Duet 11″, and here we are with some real potential that another MediaTek-powered device is in the works that could perhaps be a far more powerful Chromebook tablet on schedule to arrive in 2025. Let’s piece this together.

‘Rauru’ has been around since late 2023

Though we only started to notice ‘Rauru’ in mid-2024, this reference board for the MediaTek MT8196 has been in the works since December of 2023. Since finding it, we’ve also found that this SoC was run through Geekbench at least once, and the results are impressively fast.

Those scores will likely improve by the time the MT8196 actually ships, but even with this initial run, it is on-par with the 12th-gen Core i3 found in something like the ASUS Chromebook Plus CX34, so we’re talking about some legitimate processing power, here.

With a development cycle beginning for ‘Rauru’ nearly a year ago, it’s reasonable to think that we’d see a device actually showing up for retail sale at Google’s next Chromebook Showcase – assuming they continue the scheduling trend they’ve created in the past year or so.

‘Hylia’ is a device in the ‘Rauru’ family

A new Chromebook in development I found recently that is based on the ‘Rauru’ baseboard is called ‘Hylia’, and up until today, I didn’t know much about it. The commits are few and far between right now (this is pretty normal for MediaTek device development) with most development work happening squarely for ‘Rauru’ instead.

However, a new commit that came in just last week had a few files related to it that looked a bit different than the ones we normally tend to see. This obviously piqued my interest, and I did a bit of a deeper dive. Upon opening the 0002-add-config-info.patch file, I saw something that immediately made me sit up and take notice – a reference to ‘Spikyrock’:

What is ‘Spikyrock’?

So, to be fair, I couldn’t quite remember what ‘Spikyrock’ was at first. I’ve seen it here or there during my sessions wading through the Chromium Gerrit, but I could only faintly remember seeing it in reference to ‘Roach’ – yet another thing I misunderstood until today.

‘Roach’ was added quite some time ago and has always been discussed in reference to ‘Zephyr’ (the new-ish EC for all of ChromeOS you can learn more about here) every time I’ve come across it. As these things go, I don’t tend to get too excited about EC (embedded controller) commits for Chromebooks. They are absolutely necessary, but not very news-worthy.

After looking a bit closer into ‘Spikyrock’, I realized a couple things. First, ‘Spikyrock’ is 100% the code name for a Chromebook tablet keyboard. It goes with an unreleased MediaTek Kompanio 520 tablet code-named ‘Wugtrio’, but that part is unimportant for now. What you need to know is ‘Spikyrock’ is connected to a ChromeOS tablet and is a detachable keyboard. In this file below, you can see the list of all the Chromebook tablets, their code names, and the code names of their keyboards over the years:

Early references, tablet hopes

Hopefully you are putting this together just as I have this morning. If files are being added that reference ‘Spikyrock’ for ‘Hylia’, it is reasonable to infer that they are being added for a reason. And that reason is very likely that ‘Hylia’ is being developed as a tablet.

It is early, however, so I don’t want to say that we have definite proof. However, that is how I’ll be continuing to investigate ‘Hylia’ moving forward. The idea of perhaps a larger, far more powerful Chromebook tablet is wildly enticing to me, and I’m sure it sounds awesome to many of you as well. Stay tuned on this one; I can see a lot of info emerging in the coming weeks for ‘Hylia’ for sure.