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MediaTek has announced its first system-on-chip for smartphones that features ARMv8-compatible 64-bit general-purpose cores, advanced graphics engine as well as 4G/LTE connectivity. The MT6752 is pin compatible with the previously announced quad-core MT6732 and can be installed into already developed devices.
MediaTek MT6752 integrates eight ARM Cortex-A53 cores with up to 2.0GHz clock-rate and ARM Mali T760 graphics engine with up to 16 shader cores and support for OpenGL ES 3.0/2.0/1, Direct3D 11.1, OpenCL as well as RenderScript application programming interfaces. The SoC also incorporates a video processor with H.264, H.265 encoder/decoder and motion quality enhancer as well as 16MP camera image signal processor.
The MT6752 chip comes with integrated multi-mode baseband capabilities supporting rel 9 cat 4 4G/LTE FDD and TDD LTE with data rates up to 150Mbits/s downlink and 50Mbits/s uplink, DC-HSPA+ (42Mbits/s), TD-SCDMA and EDGE for legacy 2G/3G networks. It is unclear whether the SoC also integrates Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS/GLONASS and other radio capabilities, but this is a highly-likely scenario.
“The MT6752 is part of our commitment to provide high performance yet cost effective solutions, accelerating the global demographic and cultural transformation for the super-mid market,” said Jeffrey Ju, general manager of the MediaTek smartphone business unit. “We continue to democratize technology as previously seen in the TV and DVD industries.”
The MT6752 system-on-chip will be commercially available in early third quarter of 2014, with a complete reference design and mass production slated for Q4. MediaTek did not reveal when it forecasts the first devices based on the MT6752 to become available, but it is logical to expect them to arrive late in 2014 or early in 2015, almost a year from now.
KitGuru Says: While it is clearly a bit strange to read about chips that will commercially emerge almost a year from now, thanks to such early announcements we clearly know what to expect from smartphones in late 2014 and early 2015. Multi-core 64-bit general-purpose processing, advanced graphics in most of the cases as well as 4G/LTE will get mainstream. High-end devices will probably sport all the same, but will also take advantage of large displays as well as a host of technologies aimed at prolonging battery life and cutting power consumption.
If this chip can be clocked at 4 high-clock (1.8Ghz) and 4 lowly clocked (1Ghz), then it can do Big.Little in frequency fashion rather than core switching. Meaning each core can become “little” but a maximum of 4 highly clocked cores will remain active, until a single core is active again. There are some may ways to tweak core behaviour that experimenting will help determine the optimum “governor” design.