MediaTek's first Googlebook chip goes all in on big cores
MediaTek has announced the Dimensity CX C10 Max, a 3nm laptop chip with an eight-core big-core CPU, a 55 TOPS NPU and an upcoming Googlebook in its sights.
A laptop chip with no little cores at all
MediaTek has announced the Dimensity CX C10 Max, the first chip in a new family it calls Dimensity Compute Experiences, and it is aimed at a machine nobody can buy yet: an upcoming, premium, ultra-portable Googlebook. The announcement came on 21 September from the company's home city of Hsinchu, Taiwan.
The specification is unusual for a laptop chip in one respect. There are no efficiency cores. All eight CPU cores are big ones - a single Cortex-X925, three Cortex-X4s and four Cortex-A720s - backed by 12MB of L3 and 10MB of SLC cache. The silicon is built on TSMC's 3nm process, the GPU is an 11-core Immortalis-G925 MC11 with hardware ray tracing, and the memory is LPDDR5X. MediaTek says the design is efficient enough for thin, light, fanless laptops.
The AI numbers are the headline
The MediaTek NPU 890 is rated at up to 55 TOPS, and the company describes it as agentic AI ready, built to run Gemini Intelligence features locally with faster responses and better privacy than sending everything to a server. There is also an Imagiq 1090 image processor for HDR video calls, support for two external 4K displays, Wi-Fi 7 at up to 7.3Gbps and Bluetooth 6.0. MediaTek's own footnote notes that Bluetooth 6.0 is not supported in Googlebooks.
"Dimensity CX C10 Max is designed for the next wave of intelligent computing, combining flagship performance and power-efficient processing," said Vince Hu, MediaTek's senior vice president and general manager of its Data Center and Computing Business. "Bringing these capabilities to Googlebook builds on our leadership in Android computing and continues our long history of collaboration with Google."
Where it fits
Google opened Googlebook pre-orders on 15 September from $899, with the first laptops due on 4 October in the United States and 5 October in the UK, Ireland, Canada, France, Germany and Australia, and with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X silicon already confirmed for the family. MediaTek has not said which Googlebook models will use the C10 Max, when they will go on sale, or what they will cost, so the chip is a promise about silicon rather than a device you can order today.
Our opinion
Dropping every efficiency core is the interesting decision here, because it inverts the usual laptop sales pitch. Intel and Qualcomm sell a mix of fast and frugal cores and let the scheduler shuffle work between them; MediaTek is betting that on 3nm a straight eight-wide big-core array can be fast without being thirsty, which is a cleaner story for developers and a braver one for battery life. The 55 TOPS figure deserves the same scepticism as every other TOPS figure, since it describes what the NPU can do on a good day rather than what your Gemini assistant will actually feel like. What matters more is the timing: this chip lands after Google has already opened Googlebook pre-orders, and without a named device, a date or a price. MediaTek is not really selling a processor to readers yet - it is staking a claim to the cheaper end of Google's new laptop line before the first units ship, and asking to be judged on hardware that does not exist. Worth bookmarking, not worth pre-ordering.