As far as smartphone / tablet processors go, the most common names these days are Snapdragon and MediaTek. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips are basically the best you can get on the market nowadays, this American company makes great chips, no matter if we’re talking about low, mid or high-end processors. Their chips are used in flagship smartphones / tablets all over the world and really do offer great performance. If you’re reading this you’ve probably used at least one device which had a Snapdragon processor on the inside. MediaTek on the other hand is a Chinese company which is on the rise as of late, they make extremely affordable chips and are dabbling in high-end market as well, more and more as time goes by. MediaTek chips are extremely popular in China though even manufacturers outside of Asia tend to implement them in their products. China has tons of smartphone manufacturers so MediaTek is really doing well as a company and is selling tons of their products and as I said, they’re doing great work and might take a huge chunk of the market right beneath Qualcomm’s feet.
This Chinese manufacturer has announced yet another SoC, MediaTek MT6735. This isn’t exactly a high-end processor by any means, though MediaTek partnered with Via Telecom and got access to CDMA2000 technology that way, which made it possible for MediaTek to manufacture a chip which covers all four frequency bands. This is a 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor with a frequency range of 1.3-1.5GHz. As far as graphics goes, MT6735 comes with Mali-T720 GPU. This GPU runs on max 695MHz and is made in 28nm HPM process. If we compare it to Mali-400, which is a rather old GPU at this point, it offers a performance boost of 50% and it is about 150% more energy efficient. It supports cameras up to 13-megapixels with 1080p video recording and 30FPS video capture. As far as screen resolutions go, this GPU (and chip itself) can’t run anything higher than 720p while Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band Wi-Fi are also supported. This is first MediaTek SoC which has patent licensing from VIA Telecom which really lets it support everything you can think of as far as frequencies go. MT6735 will be available in Q2 next year quite probably and will be a direct competitor to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 210 (MSM 8909), which basically puts it in a low-end category.
I have no doubt MediaTek will sell a ton of these processors considering they really made a name for themselves in a low-end market. The biggest challenge for MediaTek will be to penetrate the high-end market in 2015, Qualcomm is definitely the king as far as mid and high-end SoC’s go and the company is doing great even in the low-end market segment. Do you think MediaTek can compete with Qualcomm when it comes to high-end SoC’s?