New benchmarks show the true power of MediaTek’s upcoming MT8196 SoC

Since June, we’ve been keeping tabs on a new development board that houses what will be the most powerful MediaTek ARM SoC ever in a Chromebook: the MT8196. There’s no marketing name for this one yet (i.e. – Kompanio 1500), but my initial thoughts are that it will be the fastest ARM chip in a Chromebook by a long shot.

I’ve still been unable to track down the core configuration on the MT8196, but I did manage to find some Geekbench 6 benchmarks for it back in September, and I was pretty impressed by the numbers. While not mind-blowing, the MT8196 easily held its own with a 12th-gen Intel Core i3, and for a fanless, battery-sipping processor, that’s pretty impressive. But that was just the tip of this iceberg.

Impressive new Geekbench results

Today, I had an inkling to check in on Geekbench again, and lots of tests have now been run on ‘Rauru’ (more specifically, the derivative baseboard ‘Navi’) and the speed gains are impressive. Below, I’ll drop the scores from September and one of the many from late November for you to see this first hand:

As you can clearly see, the jump up in performance is huge! The single core score is 24% higher and more importantly, the multi-core score jumped up a whopping 30%. Those are insane improvements, and you can now stack this upcoming MT8196 up against some of the highest-end Chromebooks currently on the market. Here’s a look at the ASUS ExpertBook CX54 Chromebook Plus (‘Screebo’ based on the ‘Rex’ development board) with the Core Ultra 5-116U and 16GB of RAM for reference:

You’re seeing that correctly! These scores put the new MediaTek MT8196 substantially ahead of one of the best Chromebooks currently on the market from a sheer performance standpoint. While I don’t anticipate these scores getting a ton better than this before launch, I don’t think they really need to in order to be wildly impressive.

For the first time when this chip shows up, we’ll have ARM-based Chromebooks that aren’t hitting 2-year-old benchmarks, but setting the standard for performance on current-gen devices. And make no mistake; these devices will be Chromebook Plus this time around.

There was a bit of back-and-forth on the Kompanio 838 inside the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 11″ on whether or not it would be Chromebook Plus. With the MT8196, there will be no doubt. Assuming it gets placed in a device with the requisite 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, 1080p screen/camera, we’ll definitely be looking at the first of (hopefully) many Chromebook Plus devices with ARM on the inside.