MediaTek Announces Quad-Core Chip for Smartphones

By Zak Islam
published

MediaTek joins Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm for chips designed for high-end smartphones.

MediaTek has announced that it will compete with Samsung, Nvidia and Qualcomm in the emerging market for quad-core chips designed for smartphones.

The Taiwan-based company confirmed the existence of its MT6589, a quad-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) that offers a modem supporting HSPA+, as well as other international standards. A modem being incorporated into a quad-core chip will be a first, the company said.

The processor itself is based on ARM's Cortex-A7 design, which is the same technology found in Qualcomm's forthcoming quad-core S4 processors.

Qualcomm's aforementioned chip, however, won't launch until the latter stages of 2013. The MediaTek chip, meanwhile, will power a number of smartphones expected to ship during the first quarter of 2013.

MediaTek's MT6589 supports 1080p 30fps/30fps low-power video playback and recording, a camera boasting 13-megapixels and up to a 1,920x1,080 resolution display.

Samsung recently announced the existence of its Exynos 5440 Quad-Core processor, which is widely expected to be powering the upcoming Galaxy S4.

Despite smartphone manufacturers starting to increase the amount of quad-core-powered handsets launched into the market, an IHS analyst believes vendors will soon move away from focusing on integrating quad-core chips in favor of delivering a more solid core experience.

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Zak Islam
6 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rangas
    More solid core experience is way better than moar cores.
    Reply
  • Thunderfox
    Who cares. It doesn't support LTE, so big name phones won't use it, just like the next Exynos.
    Reply
  • Dangi
    ThunderfoxWho cares. It doesn't support LTE, so big name phones won't use it, just like the next Exynos.
    There are lots of countries that doesn't have LTE network, hell even in the USA there is no full LTE network, so why bother with LTE connectivity while it isn't fully extended yet, or do you think companies are willing to design differents phones for each country?



    Now what phones need to improve are their batteries
    Reply
  • yeesh
    I'm curious, what kind of processor intensive tasks are people doing with their smart phones and tablets that benefits from quad core CPUs. My understanding is probably obsolete, but whenever I explain to someone the benefits of more cores on a desktop CPU, I always bring up ripping audio or video, or rendering, or stuff like that which is easily split into independent chunks to make full use of all available cores. But people don't do stuff like that on tablets and smartphones. What other stuff do they do that benefits from multi-core?
    Reply
  • amdwilliam1985
    I can totally see chips like these raise the low/mid-end performance bars for low/mid-end Android/Windows phones.
    This is great news for them. Image smart phones with 3 to 5 days of battery life with normal usage :)
    Reply
  • Zingam_Duo
    yeeshI'm curious, what kind of processor intensive tasks are people doing with their smart phones and tablets that benefits from quad core CPUs. My understanding is probably obsolete, but whenever I explain to someone the benefits of more cores on a desktop CPU, I always bring up ripping audio or video, or rendering, or stuff like that which is easily split into independent chunks to make full use of all available cores. But people don't do stuff like that on tablets and smartphones. What other stuff do they do that benefits from multi-core?Well, maybe 1 core for the phone itself, 1 for the OS and miscellaneous background services.... and 2 cores for 3rd party apps or something?
    Reply