MediaTek Unveils Kompanio 1380 Chipset for Premium Chromebooks

In short: The MediaTek Kompanio 1380 is not the most advanced mobile chipset and definitely lacks the 5G connectivity of the Kompanio 1300T. That doesn’t stop the Taiwanese company from offering it to OEMs like Acer who want to build premium Chrome OS Chromebooks and tablets at a more affordable price point.

MediaTek’s main focus right now is on getting back into the game with high performance mobile chipsets with offerings like the Dimensity 9000 SoC. Earlier this month, someone who received an engineering sample of the new chipset found that it was faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 mobile platform and placed between Apple’s A14 and A15 chips in terms of performance. On the GPU side, the story is different, but the MediaTek part is said to be slightly more power efficient than its competitors.

Another area where the Taiwanese company is trying its hand is the Chromebook market. To this end, MediaTek simply disclosed the next-generation Kompanio 1380 chipset, designed for high-performance Chromebooks and tablets running Chrome OS.

The new chipset is based on TSMC’s 6nm process node and combines an octa-core processor with four high-performance Arm Cortex A-78 cores running at 3GHz and four energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores running at 2GHz. There is also a Mali-G57 Penta-Core GPU and the chipset supports LPDDR4X RAM at 2133MHz. This allows the Kompanio 1380 to drive two 4K UHD displays at 60Hz, three 4K displays at 30Hz, or one 1440p display at 120Hz.

The first device with the new chipset is the Acer Chromebook Spin 513. Pricing starts at $599/€649, and Acer says it’s targeting an April release window for the European and Asian markets and a June release window for Canada and the US.