MediaTek 2GHz octa-core

Samsung may say its Galaxy S4’s Exynos 5 Octa chipset has eight cores, but in reality, the chip follows ARM’s big. LITTLE architecture and is a combination of two quad-core processors—a powerful Cortex A15 chip and a power-efficient Cortex A7 CPU. However, it seems Taiwan-based MediaTek might be the one to unveil the first smartphone/tablet chipset to actually boast of eight cores.

Taiwanese news website UDN reports that the new chipset’s processors are Cortex A7 CPUs clocked at 2GHz, and following MediaTek’s naming convention for its SoCs, is called MT6592. From what little we could make of the translated article, it seems the company has started introducing the product to its customers and is scheduled to begin mass production in November this year. The report says we could expect the first phones powered by the chipset to hit the market in time for the Chinese New Year.

The chipset will reportedly be manufactured using Taiwan Semiconductor’s 28nm fabrication process, the same manufacturing process that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 chips are made on. It’s also stated that the SoC achieved a point score of around 30,000 on AnTuTu Benchmark, which means it falls somewhat behind the Snapdragon 800, which has a score of about 35,000 on AnTuTu. The MT6952 is, however, much faster than the Snapdragon 600, which falls below the 25,000 point mark.

However , the MT6952 SoC is sure to be cheaper than comparable offerings by competitors considering the number of low-cost phones using the company’s chips. The company’s MT6589 SoC is more or less the beating heart of the quad-core smartphone boom that’s raging in India and has already swept China. It is known to provide about 75-80 percent of the performance of a Tegra 3, Snapdragon S4 Pro or an Exynos 4 quad-core SoC, but it is available at half the price.