Upcoming MediaTek Chromebook Tablets being tested with on-device AI hardware

I’ll go ahead and level with you right off the jump: I’m not educated on the underpinnings of AI and how it all works together in hardware and software. I know some processors and SoCs are better equipped to do AI tasks than others, but I also know there’s plenty of AI being leveraged on devices that don’t have bespoke, AI-ready internals. Getting to the actual worth of this sort of hardware/software combo usually means wading through a mess of marketing hype and buzzwords, so for now I’m just a casual observer of it all.

Even with Chromebooks, I’ve written about the fact that we (should) have some cool AI features coming to Chromebook Plus any day now, and none of these devices have processors inside that were “built for AI”. In fact, most have 12th-gen Intel silicon inside, and that means these boards and processors were developed and released in devices that pre-date the AI rush that really stormed the world in the fall of 2022.

MediaTek Chromebook tablets with AI hardware

I say all of that to preface what I’ve found today in the Chromium Repositories with a bit of context. Yes, it looks like the upcoming MediaTek MT8188 Chromebook tablets are being prepped to take advantage of some on-device AI smarts, but the truth is we have no clue what that will actually mean when they launch. Again, the marketing hype is real for AI right now, so I don’t want to add to that at all. But what I found today shows me that ‘Geralt’ – the baseboard for these new tablets – is being outfitted with something called MediaTek Neuron and Google’s TensorFlow Lite.

Sorry for all of the screen grabs up there, but I wanted to show you all I’ve found. Even without knowing too much about all this at a core level, you can see clearly that a combination of TensorFlow Lite and MediaTek’s Neuron are being added and tested on ‘Geralt’. How the two work together and how this will all shake out could remain a mystery even after some of these new tablets launch.

What is most definitely clear is ‘Geralt’ devices should be able to easily leverage whatever AI features Google has planned in the future for Chromebooks – specifically Chromebook Plus. While there’s no definitive proof yet that these tablets will get included in the Chromebook Plus family, the fact that they are readying some AI smarts on the hardware side seems to indicate this should be the case.

What is MediaTek Neuron?

One last thing I want to cover here are the references to MediaTek Neuron. I searched for this and only came up with MediaTek NeuroPilot, which the company explains it like this:

NeuroPilot is a set of software tools and APIs for developing efficient AI applications on MediaTek platforms. NeuroPilot is the center of MediaTek’s AI ecosystem and embraces ‘Edge AI’, where AI processing is performed locally on-device rather than remotely on a server. This makes AI tasks faster, while also keeping data private.

via MediaTek

Is this what is being referenced in the Gerrit? I feel like that is the case, but I can’t confirm that 100%. “Neuron” could be the code name (an admittedly weak one) used for development purposes, or this could be a completely different thing. I did find one other file that lays out quite clearly what “Neuron” is built for, so you can make your own conclusions, there.

Whatever this is, it is clearly a model built for on-device, AI-driven tasks. This could totally happen behind the scenes and not be a marketing factor at all, but I’d imagine this will be a central focus for these devices when they launch. ‘Geralt’ has been in development for a long time at this point, and we only have one certified device being built from it right now in ‘Ciri’. I look for more almost every day, and you can be sure I’ll let you all know when I find some. But for now, it’s fun to think of how this powerful ARM processor in a new Chromebook tablet will perform with some AI abilities baked in. Hopefully we’ll know more soon.