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At CES 2022, Acer took to the virtual stage to announce a series of new Chromebooks. The company’s upcoming lineup is headlined by the Acer Chromebook Spin 513, which looks to be quite a compelling option once it arrives. A large part of the reason why has to do with MediaTek’s latest Kompanio 1380 chipset.
While the Kompanio 1380 was not formally introduced at CES 2022, MediaTek has taken the wraps off of what this chipset will be capable of. MediaTek is already the #1 provider of Arm-based Chromebooks, and the company hopes that its lead will continue to grow.
As for what the Kompanio 1380 provides, we’ll see an octa-core CPU comprised of four Cortex-A78 cores for high performance. This is paired with the Arm Mali-G57 GPU which can take advantage of LPDDR4X RAM. MediaTek has also built in its own APU 3.0, which focuses more on AI enhancements for the camera and voice applications “while also optimizing battery life”.
Other features of the Kompanio 1380 include AV1 hardware decoding, and support for up to two 4K displays using a 60Hz refresh rate. Or, you can have a total of three monitors, if you swap a 60Hz display for two 30Hz displays at 4K resolution. We’ll also see support for Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, along with Bluetooth 5.0.
The Acer Chromebook Spin 513 will be the first Chromebook to launch using MediaTek’s new chipset. Today’s announcement didn’t provide any additional information pertaining to the Spin 513. However, Acer stated that its upcoming Chromebook would launch sometime in June while being priced at $599.
It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how the Kompanio 1380 stacks up in the Chromebook space. Hopefully, this will open the door for more high-performance Chromebook options at competitive prices. Finally, MediaTek stated that there will be more devices “powered by the Kompanio 1380” available on the market “soon”. So we shouldn’t have too much longer to wait to see what’s in the pipeline.
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