Power, Performance, and Efficiency:
The MediaTek Kompanio Ultra 910 Architectural Advantage
-
Ryan Shrout
For over four decades, the trajectories of both the PC and the x86 architecture seemed inseparable; in 1979, Intel introduced its very first x86 chip, the 8086 processor, and just two years later it released the cut-down 8088 variant for the IBM Personal Computer, the original PC. Nearly all competitors to the x86 PC went out of business by the end of the millennium, and even as recently as a few years ago it was assumed that the PC belonged to the x86 architecture forever.
But within just a few years, the Arm architecture has transformed the situation for the PC and the market that has grown around it. At first, Arm penetration into the PC market was gradual, but lately the pace has dramatically increased as more high-performance processors are introduced. Intel and AMD, the sole stewards and designers of x86 chips, are now facing competition from several different series of Arm CPUs, including MediaTek’s latest Kompanio Ultra 910 for Chromebook Plus laptops.
Key Highlights
The Kompanio Ultra 910 outperforms the latest x86 Chromebooks, delivering up to 2x faster CPU and up to a 9x faster graphics performance.
While x86 systems throttle up to 42% on battery, the Kompanio Ultra 910 remains stable with only a 6% drop.
The Kompanio Ultra 910 consumes up to 85% less power under load and achieving nearly 5x the efficiency of the latest x86 silicon Chromebooks.
The Kompanio Ultra 910 on the whole is very similar to MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400 for smartphones. Considering how powerful mobile chips can be today, this is actually a positive for the Kompanio Ultra 910, and you’ll see that in the upcoming benchmarks that pit MediaTek’s latest chip against similarly priced x86-based Chromebooks and Windows laptops.
On the CPU side of the processor, MediaTek uses an all-big-core design rather than a big-little configuration like many other Arm chip designers. However, the Kompanio Ultra 910 does have different variants of the Arm Cortex core: starting with the fastest, the chip has one Cortex-X925 core, three Cortex-X4 cores, and four Cortex-A720 cores, for a total of eight. By using different big cores from the Cortex series, MediaTek is able to reap some of the benefits of a big-little design but with a slant towards performance.
| Number of Cores | Maximum Boost Frequency | L2 Cache | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Arm
Cortex-X925 |
1 | 3.62 GHz | 2MB |
|
Arm
Cortex-X4 |
3 | 3.3 GHz | 1MB |
|
Arm
Cortex-A720 |
4 | 2.4 GHz | 412 KB |
Paired with these CPU cores is support for fast LPDDR5X memory clocked at 8533 MHz. At that speed, the Kompanio Ultra 910 is actually faster than the best x86 chips designed for laptops, with the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H rated for LPDDR5(X) at 8400 MHz and the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375 for LPDDR5X at 8000 MHz. Compared to CPUs the MediaTek processor directly competes with, its memory support is generally superior.
For integrated graphics, the Kompanio Ultra 910 has the 11-core variant of the Arm Immortalis-G925, the second-fastest iGPU in Arm’s latest 5th generation of graphics. Focused largely on gaming and AI, the Immortalis-G925 features improved ray tracing and machine learning performance, respectively 52% and 34% faster than the previous Immortalis-G720 in these areas, while also using 30% less power.
Alongside the CPU and GPU is of course the Neural Processing Unit or NPU, the thing that makes locally AI performant and efficient. The MediaTek NPU 890 inside the Kompanio Ultra 910 is rated for up to 50 TOPS, which puts it in the same neighborhood as high-end designs from Intel, AMD, and other Arm chip designers.
|
Memory Capacity
|
24 GB |
|
Memory Speed
|
LPDDR5X-8533 |
|
Integrated GPU
|
11-core Arm Immortalis-G925 |
|
Video Encode/
Decode Support |
HEVC, AVC, VP9, AV15 |
|
Display Support
|
1 Internal up to 4K60, 2 External up to 4K |
|
Neural Processing
Unit |
MediaTek NPU 890 |
|
NPU TOPS
|
Up to 50 |
As for the manufacturing process that the Kompanio Ultra 910 is fabricated with, MediaTek is using TSMC’s 3nm, which has been one of the company’s cutting-edge process since 2022. Compared to TSMC’s 5nm process, 3nm allows for up to 15% higher peak performance at the same power and up to a 35% reduction in power at equal performance. This means 3nm is a pretty substantial improvement in power efficiency, something that is important for all processors in general, and especially so for laptop chips.
Don’t assume the Kompanio Ultra 910 doesn’t have PC-grade connectivity just because it has smartphone DNA. The chip supports up to three 4K monitors, one internal and two external over a single DisplayPort cable with Multi-Stream Transport. At the same time, the Kompanio Ultra 910 gets lots of benefits from its mobile heritage: high-quality, efficient audio with low-power standby, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.0, and camera support.
The ultimate goal of this Signal65 Lab Insights report is to compare the Kompanio Ultra 910 to competing silicon in both Chromebooks and Windows PCs, which should give us an understanding of what position MediaTek’s latest PC chip has in the modern laptop market and what it offers in this segment that similar processors do not.
