Samsung might not be the only manufacturer in the eight-core processor game for much longer, if new reports are to be believed.
According to a leaked company roadmap uncovered by Sina Weibo, MediaTek is fast-tracking development of its own octa-core chip, which it hopes will be ready by November of this year.
Though Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa does indeed feature eight processor cores, only four are ever active at once.
Based on the reports about MediaTek's new Cortex-A7 MT6592, all eight of the processors will truly work in unison, and at a lower cost to boot.
Eight is enough
Taiwanese site UDN first picked up on the Cortex-A7 MT6592, which it reported will run at 2GHz, and has already been shown to several potential MediaTek clients in the past week.
The chip purportedly scored a 30,000 using AnTuTu's benchmarking, which puts it behind Qualcomm's quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800. MediaTek's chip, however, is believed to cost quite a bit less.
MediaTek is supposedly planning to use TSMC's 28nm manufacturing process starting in November, with the first phones using the octa-core processor due to arrive in early 2014, around the Chinese New Year.
The Taiwanese company is also believed to be ramping up its 4G LTE compatibility alongside its new chip, as a separate UDN report revealed more than a 100 new jobs had opened up at MediaTek last month.
Quad-core coming too?
The octa-core MT6592 might not be the only new processor coming from MediaTek this year either, as the company appears to be readying a quad-core version, too.
The leaked company documents uncovered named a 1.7GHz MT6588 quad-core processor as arriving in Q4 as well, though it sounds like more of a faster upgrade of the existing MT6589 chip than an off-shoot of the MT6592.
While more details on the MT6592 are sparse at this time, those same docs did reveal the octa-core processor would be able to decode 1080p video at 30fps.
What's more, both of the new chips are purportedly compatible with the upcoming quad-core 1.3GHz MT6582, which should help keep the costs down on the later-arriving chips.
MediaTek's MT6290 LTE modem will also be compatible with all three of the chips, which bodes well for the company's plans to finally delve into faster cellular space.
Even if MediaTek's new chips aren't quite as powerful as Qualcomm's offerings, the value incentive may be enough to sway some Chinese manufacturers to the cheaper processors.
With Sony already reportedly on board with MediaTek for its upcoming C3 smartphone, there's no telling which others will follow suit.
Via Engadget
