The awesome MediaTek MT8196 will also come with Wi-Fi 7

There’s been a ton of hype recently around the upcoming MediaTek MT8196 SoC that is set to arrive at some point in a Chromebook Plus model in 2025. We’re hoping for sooner rather than later, but there’s no real timeline on it just yet. Still, the interest in this chip is for a few very good reasons: namely, it will be the fastest Chromebook on the market when it arrives, and it will be pulling off this superlative with an ARM chip in a Chromebook for the first time.

With Geekbench showing the MT8196 in ‘Navi’ to be better than any current Chromebook in single core, multi-core, GPU and NPU scores, we’re expecting some pretty amazing performance in what we can only hope is a razor-thin chassis, little-to-no fans necessary, and a true, flagship Chromebook experience from top to bottom.

New info on connectivity

While this isn’t a huge find like screen size, resolution, or form factor, I have stumbled upon a commit in the Chromium Repositories that shows us what sort of connectivity options this new MT8196 should be shipping with.

The MediaTek MT7925 network adapter is being added to ‘Rauru’ (the main baseboard that ‘Navi’ is spawned from) and that means we’re looking at not only Wi-Fi 7, but also Bluetooth 5.4 as well. That means this new ‘Navi’ device (likely on the way from Lenovo) will have great connectivity hardware with the latest versions of both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on board and ready for use.

Granted, there’s a lot more that goes into connectivity than just version numbers, but Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 is where you’d ideally start. Google has been improving the Bluetooth stack substantially for ChromeOS in the past year or so and at this moment, there are no Wi-Fi 7 Chromebooks on the market. With a proper Wi-Fi 7 router around, this new Chromebook with the MT8196 inside should be able to get great internet speeds and the best latency scores we’ve seen up to this point.

There’s still much we don’t yet know about ‘Navi’ – that much is for sure. But I’m digging around every day to find new, interesting tidbits where I can as we continue to anticipate the arrival of this new era of Chromebooks. As ARM processors have done for Macbooks and for Windows devices, they are coming for Chromebooks as well. And for the very first time, we won’t be talking about them as “fast for ARM.” They’ll be flagship devices through and through; and that’s really exciting.