Of course you know that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 (GT-I9500) was the first smartphone to ship with an octa-core processor, the Exynos 5410. The Exynos 5410, made by Samsung, was not an absolute 8 core chip since it just employed ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture to pair two sets of cores: four Cortex-A15 and four cortex-A7 cores. The cores don’t work at a go but instead alternate with the A15 cores being called into action when there are heavy taks like say a game with 3D graphics while the A7 chips handle all the light tasks in order to get more done with less impact on system resources and battery drain. MediaTek is out to change all that with a “true” octa-core processor, the MT6592. In photos leaked hours ago, the MediaTek chip seems to be on course and should arrive soon to rival Samsung.
Samsung, which pioneered the octa-core ship, has since upgraded the exynos 5410 with a newer Exynos 5420 chip that will be shipping with some variants of the Galaxy Note 3. MediaTek was amongst the very first chip companies to speak out against Samsung’s Exynos 5410 chip and why it was pointless but four months later here they are. Qualcomm is still talking tough as regards the multi-core debacle saying that focus should be on optimizing perfomance so that a lot is done using low power and not just adding more and more cores to achieve the same. Only time will tell if they’ll go back on their word and join Samsung and MediaTek in the multi-core race. Of course Qualcomm is still at the very top with the benchmark beast, Snapdragon 800 SoC, so things are still calm. MediaTek is know for supplying its chips to most low price Android OEMs for use in budget devices and mid-range devices with a few instances of high end devices from the Chinese market but these new developments could see it start supplying chips to the big boys.
