MediaTek will take on Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia in the emerging market for mobile quad-core chips, says C/Net. MediaTek, based in Taiwan, has begun sampling “the industry’s first commercial quad-core smartphone chips, integrated with multimode modem.”
Other chip makers are shipping quad-core apps processors, but none has introduced an apps processor integrated with a modem in a single chip, claimed Finbarr Moynihan, MediaTek’s general manager for business development.
The MediaTek MT6589 supports 1080p 30fps/30fps low-power video playback and recording, a 13MP camera, and up to a 1,920×1,080 resolution display.
MediaTek’s SoC, fabricated using a 28-nm process, integrates an HSPA+/TD-SCDMA modem, a quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU subsystem from ARM and a PowerVR Series5XT GPU from Imagination Technologies. It is being positioned to compete head-to-head with Qualcomm, which announced last week two new quad-core chips with integrated modems that work with UMTS, CDMA and TD-SCDMA. Both are based on ARM’s Cortex A7 cores.
In the first half of 2012, Strategy Analytics ranked MediaTek second (with a 12.8 percent share of revenues) in the global cellular baseband processor market that includes 2G, 3G and LTE.
China’s smartphone growth is going to be astounding. It will be followed by a huge wave of Indian users. Together they will drive the broadband wireless industry.
What China and India want, they’ll get. The West must deal with it.
