MediaTek’s unconventional MT6592 octa-core SoC has popped up in more benchmarks and the results are encouraging.

According to Android Community, the Antutu benchmark database shows three different devices based on the weird chip, a 1080p device, a 720p device and what appears to be a WUXGA (2048x1536) tablet.

The 720p device scored 27442, while the 1080p device did even better – 28,198. At WUXGA the score was just 14,582. This last result is unimpressive, but it also happens to be more realistic than the first two. It’s worth noting that there are tons of cheap WUXGA tablets churned out by Chinese white-box outfits and they don’t mind cutting corners (i.e. slow RAM/storage and not much of it, cheaper parts with lower clocks).

In addition, Android benchmarks are notoriously unreliable and the results should be taken with a grain of salt. Even Antutu admits that some manufacturers are basically optimizing their devices to get good scores in benchmarks, but the tweaks don’t have an impact on real world performance.

Obviously, on an A7 octa-core, such tweaks could yield great results, but since most apps don’t handle multicores nearly as well as benchmarks, real world performance won’t be as impressive. The biggest and baddest SoCs out there like the Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 usually score 35k to 40k+ in Antutu, so an octa-core A7 shouldn’t even come close, not on paper, not in benchmarks and certainly not in real life.

It looks like and smells like benchmarketing.