MediaTek on Wednesday unveiled the world's first true octa-core mobile processor, the MT6592. The chip contains eight low-power Cortex-A7 cores clocked between 1.7GHz and 2GHz and with the help of Heterogeneous Multi-Processing and ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, all eight cores can be used at the same time.
Some apps can already take advantage of all eight cores including Chrome, select mapping apps and video players. In a presentation hosted earlier today, MediaTek claims the chip beats out what appears to be the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 in benchmark tests, power consumption and operating temperature.
Multimedia buffs will appreciate many of the features supported by the new flagship chip including an image signal processor that supports up to 16-megapixel camera modules and the ARM Mali-450 MP graphics processor operating at 700MHz. The latter is said to deliver full HD UI drawing at 60fps as well as solid gaming performance.
Elsewhere, the chip is capable of video frame rate upscaling to 60fps to reduce motion blur and 4K H.264 video decoding in addition to full HD H.265/VP9 playback. Better yet, the 28-nanometer MT6592 is expected to show up in devices by the end of the year.
One area the company still needs to work on is 4G although according to general manager Xie Qingjiang, a 4G modem will be coming down the pipeline by the end of the year as well. It'll be available for manufacturers to use with new chips in the first half of next year, we're told.