MediaTek will be launching the first “true” octa-core chip later this year, UnwiredView is reporting. The upcoming MediaTek will be called MT6592 and clocked at up to 2GHz.
This solution will likely find a number of buyers among Chinese OEMs but we presume some devices will also find their way to the Western markets.
It’s important to note that MediaTek’s product uses eight Cortex-A7 cores, which aren’t as fast as those used in today’s top-end chips like NVIDIA Tegra 4 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 — these chips have four of the more powerful Cortex-A15 cores. What’s more, many apps don’t use more than 2-3 cores so adding more of the slower cores may not add much to the performance, though you never know. Perhaps MediaTek manages to make some kind of middleware that could split tasks among all these cores and get an extra boost this way.
Meanwhile, Qualcomm is arguing we need better not more cores, saying that its Snapdragon 800 is much faster than any other eight-core chip, including Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa that has four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores. The first four are used for more demanding tasks like 3D graphics, while the second four – for more mundane tasks to save energy.