The first MediaTek MT8189 Chromebook gets benchmarked, underwhelms

The ongoing story of ‘Skywalker’ and its massive family of upcoming Chromebooks has been pretty interesting to track thus far. The anticipation for what’s next from MediaTek with their new MT8189 ARM chip has been high, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting the first real-world performance data.

Well, that day has arrived. The first of these new devices, codenamed ‘Yoda’, has appeared in the Geekbench database, giving us our first look under the hood of the new MT8189 SoC. And what we’re seeing is frankly a little disappointing. Let me explain.

Carbon copy benchmark scores

According to the Geekbench result for ‘Yoda’, the MediaTek MT8189 is an 8-core ARM processor with four performance cores clocked at 2.60 GHz and four efficiency cores at 2.00 GHz. If that sounds familiar, it should. That core layout is completely identical to the MediaTek MT8188 (Kompanio 838) that powers the excellent Lenovo Chromebook Duet 11″ (codenamed ‘Ciri’).

In what should be a shock to no one, ‘Yoda’ puts up numbers that are nearly identical to what we see from the Duet 11. This strongly suggests that, from a raw CPU performance standpoint, the new MT8189 is basically the exact same SoC as the MT8188. I have to admit, I was hoping for more.

I was honestly expecting a more significant leap, similar to the big jump in performance we saw from the MT8195 to the fantastic MT8196 (Kompanio Ultra) that’s in the new Lenovo Chromebook Plus 14. A bump in the model number usually signals something more substantial. So, what could be going on?

It’s possible that this is a very early engineering sample of ‘Yoda’ and that the final hardware could be different. However, the more likely scenario is that MediaTek has made more subtle, targeted upgrades to the SoC that aren’t reflected in a CPU benchmark. Perhaps they’ve improved the NPU for on-device AI tasks or upgraded the GPU for better graphics performance while leaving the main CPU cores unchanged.

For now, we have to go on the data we have. And that data says the MT8189, at its core, looks to be a re-release of the MT8188. While that’s still a very capable and efficient chip, it’s not the generational leap I was hoping for. We’ll continue to track ‘Yoda’ and the other seven devices in the ‘Skywalker’ family to see if we can unearth more details, but my initial excitement for this new chip has definitely been tempered a bit.