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Earlier this year, MediaTek brought their Octa-Core MT8183 to the Chrome OS party but since then, we’ve seen no sign of a new device powered by the ARM-based processor. However, development of the baseboard ‘Kukui’ continues to move forward and today we get our first glimpse at what could be the first Chromebook built on said board.
Flapjack
Provide the concept of baseboard and variants to facilitate
sharing code across different kukui variants. Also, add flapjack
as a placeholder variant of kukui.
There isn’t much else to discern about ‘Flapjack’ at the moment but we’re tracking it to see when the .dtsi file pops up as it will reveal more about what form-factor we’re looking at as well as information about the display size.
We are fully anticipating some news on the Qualcomm/Chrome OS front in the very new future but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for a little competition. MediaTek’s first run at the Chrome OS market was a limited one but the devices birthed from the quad-core MT8173 are great Chromebooks and have been received well in the Chrome community.
Devices like the Lenovo Flex 11 perform on par with their Intel counterparts which are powered by Apollo Lake chipsets and some would say that the ARM-based MediaTek chip handles Android apps better which kind of makes sense.
The latest processor from MediaTek to join the Chromium repository leaps passed the hexa-core setup of the RockChip RK339 found in the Samsung Chromebook Plus at will host 8 cores to go head-to-head with the rumored Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 we’re all waiting for.
The new Chrome device ‘Flapjack’ is built on this octa-core platform and could end up being the first of the second-gen MediaTek Chromebooks to market. Added just this week, it is very doubtful we’ll see this one at CES but perhaps it will make its debut at Computex at the end of May.
Source: Chromium Repository
