MediaTek is working on Chrome OS support

The Taiwanese designer of cheap ARM-socs MediaTek is working on a developer board with ARM Cortex A7 chip that runs Chrome OS. This indicates that cheap laptops or tablets with Chrome OS and MediaTek soc are on the way.

MediaTek’s Cortex A7 board has been codenamed Moose, according to the addition to the Chromium OS repository, reported by Google developer François Beaufort. Kernel support shows that the board includes the MediaTek MT8127. This is quad-core announced in May this year with a clock speed of 1.5GHz and with Mali 450 MP4 GPU that can process hevc/h.265 video.

The processor is built around economical Cortex A7 cores and is mainly intended for tablets, including the Alcatel OneTouch PIXI 8 that will appear later this year. It is unclear whether the MediaTek board is intended for a Chrome OS tablet, which has been rumored for some time, or for a Chromebook. If it is a Chromebook, it may have a long battery life, but not a powerful performance. Based on the specifications, it can be expected that the processor will perform less, for example, than the Samsung Exynos 5250 equipped with two Cortex A15 cores, which is used in the previous Chromebook generation from Samsung and the current HP Chromebook 11.

The arrival of Chrome OS devices with MediaTek socs may lead to systems with Google’s operating system appearing for less than 200 euros. Rockchip, another designer of low-cost ARM socs, is also working on support for Chrome OS.