MediaTek’s MT8196 could power the fastest Chromebooks ever made [VIDEO]

I can confidently say that I did not expect this little tidbit as I came to the office this morning. In doing my usual rounds hunting and searching for news about upcoming Chromebook hardware, I had a gut feeling that I needed to check Geekbench to see if any new devices have been tested lately.

Though I didn’t find anything we’ve not seen before, I did stumble upon a new score for a Chromebook development board that we are extremely excited to see later in 2025. That board is ‘Navi’ (based on the ‘Rauru’ baseboard) and it will show up housing highly-anticipated MT8196 – an ARM-based SoC from MediaTek that we’ve been closely following for quite some time now.

Recent findings have led us to understand that this SoC is basically the Dimensity 9400 with some Chromebook-specific tweaks, and that is a very good thing. The Dimensity 9400 is a beast of a chip for phones and tablets already on the market, and it has proven itself as a very fast, very capable chip that can go toe-to-toe with the latest Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm.

And while we fully expected this MT8196 to be fast and capable, these latest Geekbench results take things to a whole new level in terms of sheer power, GPU, and AI capabilities. These scores put ‘Navi’ well above quite literally every Chromebook on the market at this point – even those with the Intel Core Ultra 7 inside. Take a look:

MT8196 wins in all categories

As a reference, the fastest Chromebook currently available would be a device with the Intel Core Ultra 7 inside (‘Karis’ – or the Acer Chromebook Plus Spin 714 is one example) and the results for that device – while impressive – don’t match what we’re seeing for ‘Navi’ in any category. From single core to multi-core, GPU and NPU, the MT8196 wins them all.

So, what this means is we’ll finally have an ARM SoC in a Chromebook that won’t simply try and keep up with Intel processors – it will stomp them. This latest benchmark run pushed numbers up quite a bit from the previous tests, but not wildly so. If we saw this jump compared with only the tests run in December, I’d think it was a fluke. However, scores in January were much closer to this latest high score, so I’m more tempted to believe this chip has what it takes to be in the top performance spot in the Chromebook ecosystem when it arrives.

Intel Panther Lake looms

Now, this could change if Intel’s Panther Lake processors arrive in Chromebooks before we get ‘Navi’ or ‘Hylia’. I don’t think that will happen, but it is possible. So far, there are no benchmarks run on Panther Lake Chromebooks, so we have no idea what sort of performance jump to expect.

At this point, the MT8196 is far enough ahead that I don’t foresee Panther Lake giving us a massive performance boost that puts Intel back in first place by a massive amount. However, that’s just a gut feeling, not fact. Panther Lake could be a huge improvement over the last few generations of Intel silicon that has been in Chromebooks, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, it looks like the new King of Chromebook processors is about to be crowned. When it will happen is still a mystery, but I’m really – REALLY – rooting for it to be in the spring of 2025 and hopefully at a new Chromebook Showcase. I’m sure you all feel it, but the fact that we only got 2 new Chromebooks at the fall Chromebook Showcase is starting to really settle in. We need some big moves in the hardware space, and devices with this powerful new MT8196 could be just what the doctor ordered.