MediaTek is expected to announce two 64-bit chips at the upcoming Mobile World Congress event in the next few days according to sources over at DigiTimes. It’s said that the two new chips will be one quad-core and one octa-core chip, with the quad-core having focus on a low-end to mid range handsets, while the alleged octa-core chip will be the high end chip offered by MediaTek. Both chips are expected to hit the market towards the end of the year, with the quad-core MT6372 expected to be ready for market sometime in the third quarter, and the MT6752 octa-core being ready in the fourth quarter. Qualcomm has it’s own version of a 64-bit processor that they announced back at the beginning of December, which is their Snapdragon 410 that will be a direct competitor to the MT6372 chip.
What’s more, is that both MediaTek chips are supposedly setup with support for a wide range of network types, including WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, GSM, LTE-TDD, and LTE-FDD. Both chips are also said to be using cores from ARM, more specifically the Cortex-A53, which is structured off of the 64-bit ARMv8. Qualcomms Snapdragon also uses the Cortex A53 core, so it’s no surprise to see MediaTek using the same core if they want their 64-bit quad-core chip to be the 410’s competitor. The beauty of the Cortex A53 chip, is that it can run both 32-bit and 64-bit instructions, which makes it versatile and gives it a wide application use for multiple operating systems.
The charts below display a good view of the power behind the A53 and previous chips, and ARM thinks that manufacturers will be able to get the A53 clocked up to 2GHz. based off of what we see in the second chart, the A53 is slightly better then the A9 when it comes to performance. It will more than likely be a while still before 64-bit processing makes a huge difference in mobile phones, but there’s nothing wrong with chip makers getting a head start, leaving phone OEMs to be the ones catching up. If the chips are supposed to be ready near the end of the year, then right around the end of the summer through the holidays is when we might start to see some phones and other devices with 64-bit processors.
