MediaTek has long been the ‘other’ chipmaker – making low cost chips for entry-level or mid-range devices – offering a sensible solution at a reasonable cost…somebody needs to make all of those chips for the emerging nations, where cost is the main driving force. A funny thing happened on the way to China – new 4G networks are popping up everywhere as technology is advancing, even in the emerging nations, especially in one of the most potential markets in the world. In order for their customers to take advantage of these new 4G networks, there is suddenly a need for 4G chips…and lots of them, in fact, China estimates the need for 160 million 4G LTE devices by the end of the year.
To accommodate this demand, MediaTek is announcing on Tuesday, their new octa-core processor called MT6595. It will come in three variations: The MT6595M clocked at 2GHz – The MT6595 clocked at 2.1-2.2GHz – And the MT6595 Turbo clocked at 2.4-2.5GHz. All models are 32-bit, 4G LTE capable and offer support for QuadHD displays and 4K Video playback. The eight-core (octa-core) processor is based on big.LITTLE architecture and will use four large Cortex-A17 cores and four smaller Cortex-A7 cores along with the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing (HMP) technology – called MediaTek CorePilot. The larger cores handle the heavy-duty processing chores such as, graphic oriented games or HD movie playback, while the little cores are for light duty jobs such as, web browsing, or social media tasks. By properly assigning tasks to the proper cores you have greater efficiency, less power consumption and less heat build up, which means better battery life.
The report also suggest that closely following the MT6595 chip, MediaTek will offer a 64-bit quad-core and an eight-core LTE chip by the end of 2014. MediaTek expects to ship about 15 million LTE compatible chips by the end of 2014. Qualcomm has already lowered the price of its entry-level chipsets in China to help in its growing demand for 4G LTE devices. This can only be good news for MediaTek as they position themselves with higher end chips for the China market and will eventually trickle down to the other countries and U.S. as well.
Please hit us up on our Google+ Page and let us know if you would be willing to purchase a smartphone with a MediaTek octa-core chip…as always, we would love to hear from you.