Published in PC Hardware

MediaTek’s octa-core coming in November

by on21 October 2013

First device showcased

On Friday a curious smartphone tipped up at the Hong Kong Electronics Fair. It comes from UMI, and if you haven’t heard about this Chinese company, don’t worry, since it’s not exactly a big player.

The UMI X2S features MediaTek’s MT6592 clocked at 1.5GHz, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a 13-megapixel Sony camera. It has a 5-inch 1080p display and NFC. The price is even more impressive. When it launches it should sell for as little as $245 in China, although the top SKU will cost $327, GSM Insider reports. 

In related news, Digitimes is reporting that MediaTek will officially launch the MT6592 in the second half of November. Some phones based on the chip should show up by the end of the year, but more are expected in early 2014. Sources close to the company believe the new octa-core will allow it to gain more traction in the high-end market.

However, it should be noted that this is an A7-based chip, not a big.LITTLE design with A15 and A7 cores. As such it is relatively small and cheap to produce and it doesn’t offer as much performance as a quad-core A15 part. In any case, the first benchmarks are encouraging and indicate that MediaTek’s eight A7 cores can go toe to toe with four Krait 300 cores used in Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600, which ended up in most Android flagships this year. 

Rate this item
(0 votes)

Read more about: