Mediatek fabless communications products company is focusing more on branded tablet customers such as Lenovo, Acer and Asus with new AP – dualcore MT8125 and MT8135. The new MT8135 tablet product to be launched in 3Q13 is powered by quad-core ARM Cortex A15 and A7 with big.LITTLE heterogeneous multi-processing. MT8135 integrates a more powerful multi-core GPU (based on PowerVR Series6) optimised by Mediatek’s internal GPU team to enable branded tablet customers to be more competitive. Entry barrier in GPU should help widen the gap between Mediatek and domestic Chinese competitors.
Mediatek is sampling its octa-core MT6592 in 4Q13 with potential initial customers including Oppo, Vivo and Gionee. Unlike Samsung Exynos 5 octa-core which can only activate 4 cores at a time, Mediatek’s MT6592 offers true 8-core allowing all 8 cores to run simultaneously. The octacore is paired with quad-core ARM Mali GPU to allow up to 8Kx4K video and HEVC video encode/decode (successor to H.264). Mediatek’s customers can start developing a octa-core smartphone based on the quad-core MT6582M platform (available in 3Q13) which is pin-to-pin compatible to the upcoming MT6592, shortening time-to-market and potentially allowing Mediatek’s octa-core to be available in smartphones as soon as January 2014.
Mediatek’s launch of its new dual-core MT6572 has seen a significant pick-up in smartphones coming to the market in the past few weeks. The chipset is a good improvement from Mediatek’s prior dual core (MT6577), moving the process to 28nm using dual-core Cortex-A7 clocked at 1.2GHz, allowing support for 5MP camera, QHD resolution (960×540) and HSPA+ release 8 plus TD-SCDMA and 30 FPS 720p video.
Mediatek is also broadening its quad-core line-up to include a higher-speed turbo edition, using speed binning (taking a page from Intel) and low-cost versions (MT6589M/MT6582) in addition to the ramp-up of the lower-cost dual core (MT6572). The turbo edition scales the quad A7 up to 1.5GHz to support 13MP camera, HD display (1920×1080) and 30 FPS 1080P video. The scaled-down 6582M drops in with 1.3GHz processor, QHD resolution (960×540) and supports 8MP camera.