New MediaTek Kompanio 1200 Chromebook ‘Dragonfruit’ begins development

We’re still waiting on the promised next-gen MediaTek-powered Chromebooks to show up, but to be fair, that promise was made for Q4 of 2021. We’ve not quite made it to Q4, so Chromebooks powered by the MediaTek Kompanio 820 and 1200 aren’t technically due out just yet, but we should be getting very close at this point in late September. We’re beginning to refer to these SoCs as Kompanio, but if you’ve been following along for months, waiting for better, faster ARM Chromebooks with MediaTek chips inside, you may know these SoCs better as the MT8182 and MT8195.

The MT8192 is the mid-range ARM chip from MediaTek that should be closer to what we currently have in the Snapdragon 7c, while the higher-end MT8195 (Kompanio 1200) will be a much more modern, speedy and capable ARM chip from MediaTek designed just for Chromebooks. You can read about these chips and the ARM cores they will utilize, but there’s no doubt that the Kompanio 1200 will elevate what we expect from ARM-powered Chromebooks when it arrives on the scene.

A new addition to the family

Development on this Kompanio 1200 SoC for Chromebooks began with the arrival of ‘Cherry’ and since then, we’ve only had one other MT8195 board hit the repositories: ‘Tomato.’ We expect quite a few of these devices, honestly, so it isn’t surprising that a new one has arrived already. Adding to the Kompanio 1200 device list, we now have ‘Dragonfruit’ in the mix.

So far, the development of this particular board is a bit different from others we see and the first steps being taken mainly refer to SCP. A bit of digging reveals ARM’s SCP is a “processor-based capability that provides a flexible and extensible platform for provision of power management functions and services. ARM CSS solutions implement an SCP with the primary purposes of initialization and power control of components both within the SoC and outside the SoC, offloading these tasks from the application processors.”

Why is this the first thing being addressed for ‘Dragonfruit’? I have no idea, but that’s about all we know about this device currently. This board could end up being just a development board, but that’s unlikely since that is precisely what ‘Cherry’ is there for, so we’re unsure right now what to make of this one. For the time being, we’ll chalk it up to ‘Dragonfruite’ simply being another ‘Cherry’-based board and keep tabs on it moving forward. As I said above, I’d expect to see plenty of these boards and those based on the Kompanio 820 (‘Asurada’) as well as we move into the later parts of 2021. As always, we’ll keep searching.