Low-cost emerging market SoC/phone discussion

Possibly. And it's nice to see Mediatek doing more sensible things than making octo-A7 chips.

 

G6250 makes it a Series 6XT core which is the first time for Mediatek who previously used the G6200, so a 50% upgrade in performance of the cuff.

 

It's not only ARM, MediaTek is very aggressive.

 

Only for CPUs up to now

 

2*A72 + 2*A53 coming from MediaTek.
Who'd guess Mediatek of all companies would present such an aggressive core adoption together with such a conservative core arrangement.

Back in the 65nm era, Texas Instruments was selling 600-800MHz Cortex A8 SoCs, Qualcomm had 1GHz Scorpion cores and Mediatek was selling.. a GPU-less 400MHz ARM9 for chinese knock-offs of Galaxy S.

 

Why not? If ARM can be believed and the A72 has a 10-50% higher IPC than a A57 then the performance of the 2 A72 + 2 A53 CPUs should be roughly as high as that of the 3 Cyclones @ 1,5GHz in the new iPad; at least in geekbench.

Single-Thread the A72 @ 2,4GHz should be faster than the Cyclone @ 1,5GHz and Multi-thread the 2 A53 could add enough horse power to have an equal performance.

IMHO not bad for an midrange SoC.

 

Because we've all known Mediatek from the "TRUE OCTA COREZZZZ" 8*Cortex A7 @1.4GHz marketing material.

I'm not saying it's a badly balanced SoC, on the contrary. It's just not an approach I'd expect from Mediatek.

 

Look at it that way: I initially thought their MT8135 (which was also a 2*A15+2*A7 big.LITTLE config and actually one of the first...especially with GTS) would be a complete flop lack of any serious presence in the chinese tablet market. I recall only one rather boring Teclast tablet with it and it must have been it. Then it became clear that Amazon had contracted MTK for their low end tablets for the 8135 and it somewhat explains its lack of presence elsewhere. If you'd be MTK wouldn't you want to sustain your co-operation with an as big tablet contractor like Amazon? In order to do so you would have to keep moving on the cutting edge for that segment and/or price point. The 8173 is only a natural 64bit successor of the 8135 with 64bit ARM CPUs this time and a more recent Rogue variant at a higher clock; the recepy worked once it should work a second time too.

Now if MTK is smart enough and starts aiming for higher end SoCs too they might have a steadier customer than today in Amazon just as Texas Instruments used to be for them.

 

Hey, don't talk my MT6592 phone down. It has TRUE OCTA COREZZZZ 8*Cortex A7 @1.7GHz.

 

I'm sorry, Mariner's phone. I meant no disrespect

 

Mediatek said to be licensing GPU IP from AMD?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MediaTek-AMD-SoC-Graphics

Maybe it's time Mediatek had its own topic.

 

Given that the original "source" is actually Fudo I'm having a bit of a hard time believing it yet as is. I find it times easier to believe that MTK might want some GPU IP for something above the ULP SoC market but that's just me. He himself says "for high end SoCs" and then in the next sentence mentions mobile graphics again. It's either one or the other, but then again Fudo doesn't have the IQ to write a proper newsblurb either or keep his left from his right foot apart....

 

I'm very skeptical as well, and not only because it comes from Fudo. MediaTek has traditionally paid relatively little attention to graphics, so why would they all of a sudden go with GCN instead of just using bigger PowerVR/Mali GPUs if they want more graphics performance?

 

I don't know anything about it, however if Mediatek should be interested in developing something for the server markets it would put the idea of a deal between them and AMD into a totally different light. Other than that Fudo got first to that delicate detail and Charlie didn't?

 

From ExtremeTech now:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...smartphone-tablet-graphics-chip#disqus_thread

 

They're just rehashing Fudzilla's story.

 

According to Gizmochina, here are the leaked specs for Huawei's/Hisilicon's SoCs for 2015:



Aren't Kirin 940 and 950 a bit too close to each other? I would assume both target markets could use a single chip with one of them being downclocked. An entirely different chip because of the GPU and a (realistically small) better LTE connectivity seems a bit redundant.

 

I find it more weird that the 930 has a T628 instead of a 760 and then they jump to T8x0. There's something not adding up either way.

 

The Kirin 930 seems to be an evolutionary design from the 920/925, since they changed the CPU cores from A15+A7 to A57+A53 and little else.

From what I've seen, it's possible that the difference between the T860 and T880 are solely based on clocks, so the Kirin 940 and 950 could actually be the same chip (like the K920, K925 and K928 right now, all the same chip).

 

T860 and T880 are markedly different (3 ALU pipelines per core in T880 vs 2 in T860). I'd claim it's secret insider knowledge, but:

http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-performance-efficient-graphics/mali-t860.php
http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-performance-efficient-graphics/mali-t880.php