Right on cue, a new mid-range MediaTek ARM Chromebook starts development

Just yesteday I laid out the case for the importance of the MediaTek MT8195 finally arriving in the Chromium Repositories. While that is big news and we’re very excited to see the devices that come from MediaTek’s flagship Chromebook processor, we’re also trying to be careful not to forget the other new chip in MediaTek’s upcoming lineup that is also being built from the ground up for Chromebooks: the 7nm MT8192.

For nearly a year we’ve been keeping tabs on the development of the MT8192 and it’s primary development board in ‘Asurada’. For a bit, we thought maybe MediaTek’s early aspirations for shipping a 6nm ARM chip in a Chromebook were somehow linked to the MT8192. Even though that first announcement about their upcoming chips explicitly named the MT8195, we figured maybe the model changed a little bit from the chip we’d been tracking all along. A later announcement would then make it clear that MediaTek has two new chips – MT8192 and MT8195 – made just for Chromebooks and both would be far more powerful than anything they’ve put into a Chromebook thus far.

Months of developement, but only 2 boards

While the second MediaTek announcement clarified what was coming and what we could expect, it didn’t really help us understand why we only saw one MT8192 board being developed. Sure, ‘Hyato’ was brought on in September of 2020, but that is the only other board in the works that utilizes the MT8192. After hearing MediaTek announce these new chips, it only seemed logical that there would be at least a handful more development boards out there with the MT8192 inside and there just weren’t.

Interestingly, just as we found evidence of the MT8195 in development, we also came across a new MT8192 development board, too. Sure it only makes for 3 total boards in the MT8192 family at this point, but it stands to reason that much of the work done on ‘Asurada’ can simply be carried over into other boards as they show up and that we may start seeing more of them pretty soon. In fact, at least to start off, this new board ‘Spherion’ is literally an exact copy of ‘Asurada’:

While we don’t know a great deal about how fast this new MT8192 processor will be, the fact that it utilizes much newer ARM cores is enough to tell us that it will be considerably faster than any MediaTek-powered Chromebook that has come before. While the MT8195 will clearly be the high-end option for Chromebook makers that opt for MediaTek ARM silicon, it will be interesting to see how the MT8192 holds up and performs once it arrives. With there being 3 devices in the family now (‘Asurada’, ‘Hayato’ and ‘Spherion’), it feels a bit more like we’ll actually be getting one of these Chromebooks in production before too long.