HP looks to be prepping a MediaTek Kompanio 1000 series Chromebook

We’ve been saying it for months, but flagship-level MediaTek Kompanio-powered Chromebooks are coming. Though there are only a few boards in the works right now (‘Cherry’ and ‘Tomato’) in the 1000 series, we’ve known for some time that more would be on the way. We’ve been tracking ‘Cherry’ – the main Kompanio 1000-series base board – for the majority of 2021. We’ve been waiting for the first flagship MediaTek Chromebook for even longer. Yet, oddly enough, we’ve only had a couple development boards to keep an eye on. That finally looks to be changing.

Meet ‘Dojo’

Added over just the last couple days, ‘Dojo’ is being copied from ‘Cherry’, so that could mean a few things. ‘Dojo’ could end up a clamshell, convertible, or a tablet at this point. For now, there’s not a ton we can get from these initial few commits, but what we do know is the MediaTek Kompanio 1000 series (former known as the MT8195) will be a set of high-performance SoCs that should bring the fastest ARM-based Chromebooks we’ve ever seen to the market.

While that’s nice, it’s not a ton of info on ‘Dojo’. More will come for sure, but we did find one other nugget about this one already. By piecing together a few clues from the repositories, we can at least let us know who might be behind this MediaTek ARM-powered Chromebook.

All in an email address

As you can see in the initial commit message above, Tommy Chung has signed off on this initial start to this new Chromebook and that tells us quite a bit. After searching the repositories for his other work, it was clear that Tommy is heavily involved in other HP-made Chromebooks. Combine this with the fact that many of the yet-unannounced devices he is working on have batteries in them that point directly to an HP device and it becomes quite clear that ‘Dojo’ will be an HP device. They already have a clamshell Snapdragon 7c device in the works called ‘Kingoftown’, so it seems they are ready to fully hop on the ARM-train in 2022.

With a solid ARM-powered tablet in the Chromebook x2 11 already available, I think HP could make a few interesting devices in this lane and I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. We’re still waiting on some confirmation of a MediaTek Kompanio tablet, but so far our searching has left us empty handed. While I don’t think all Kompanio devices need to have the keyboard detaching, a few tablet options would be nice. We’ll keep a close eye on this one as we fully expect this segment of Chromebooks to grow quite a bit over the next few months.