MediaTek announces soc with four Cortex A17 and four A7 cores

MediaTek has ready the first samples of the MT6595, with which the company wants to compete directly with the Snapdragon 800 and 805. The soc is based on ARM’s big.little architecture and contains four Cortex A17 and four A7 cores. There is also hardware h.265 acceleration.

The four powerful A17 cores run at 2.2GHz to 2.5GHz, while the more economical A7 computing cores do their work at 1.7GHz. The graphical calculations are performed by a Rogue PowerVR GPU. The soc is built around ARM’s big.little concept, which means that the A17 cores can do the heavy work, but the chip can cope with the economical A7 cores under less heavy load. In addition, there is support for Heterogeneous Multi-Processing, so that it is possible to load all eight cores or use any other combination of cores.

Furthermore, according to MediaTek itself, the MT6595 is the first octacore with lte support that can process 4k content based on the h.265 codec hardware. The chip can also handle 20-megapixel camera modules and screens with a resolution of up to 2560×1600 pixels can be controlled. Finally, support for wireless charging via both induction and magnetic resonance would be present. The soc should appear in smartphones and tablets in the second half of 2014 and then compete on price with the Snapdragon 800 and 805 commonly used in high-end devices.