Less than a month ago, Mediatek, the maker of mobile phone chipsets featuring the MT6577 and MT6589 computing cores, released their latest product – the MT6592. According to Mediatek, the MT6592 is the “world’s first heterogeneous computing SOC with scalable eight-core processing for superior multi-tasking, industry-leading multimedia and excellent performance-per-watt.”
The MT6592 will build on the success of the MT6577s and MT6589s, and is expected to be available in devices running Android ‘Jelly Bean’ by the end of 2013 – which is from now onwards 🙂 In fact, the news also talked about MT6592 enabled mobile devices running Android ‘Kit-Kat’, which is expected in early 2014.
The MT6592 is built on the advanced 28nm HPM high-performance process, and capable of clock speeds up to 2GHz. By harnessing the power-efficient ARM® Cortex®-A7 processor in an octa-core configuration with the ARM Mali™ GPU, the octa-core architecture is fully scalable, which means that it is capable of running in low-power mode, as well as power hungry mode, harnessing any combinations of the cores – i.e. 1 to 8 cores, depending on the computational requirements. An advanced scheduling algorithm, also developed by Mediatek, will help to monitor temperature and power consumption of the entire platform, to ensure optimum performance for the solution.
In terms of multimedia support, it comes with a quad-core graphics engine, an advanced video playback system supporting Ultra-HD 4Kx2K H.264 video playback and support for new video codecs such as H.265 and VP9, a 16-megapixel camera and a Full HD display. The SOC also features MediaTek ClearMotion™ technology for automatic frame-rate conversion of standard 24/30fps video to high-quality 60fps video for significantly smoother playback. This means that smartphone builders would be able to incorporate these features into their Android phone featuring the MT6592 chipset at a very acceptable price range.
On the communication side, the MT6592 incorporates multi-mode cellular modem and a full connectivity capability for dual-band 801.11n Wi-Fi, Miracast screen-sharing as well as Bluetooth, GPS and an FM tuner.
With all these, the MT6592 is expected to deliver longer battery life, low-latency response times, translating to a potentially promising and positive mobile multimedia experience.
Early benchmarks of this chipset had reported a pretty respectable AnTuTu scores that go up to 29415 (for 1.7GHz CPU cores) and an impressive 32606 (for 2.0 Ghz CPU cores). This puts the new MT6592’s performance somewhere between around Galaxy S4 and Note 3. Now, that’s not too bad at all, given its likely price competitive pricing.
In the mean time, while the manufacturers start to adopt this new chipset, let’s see how the new entrant will turn out in a few months time, as the new chipset fills into the market. Since then, several mobile handsets have appeared on the market, with examples such as Lenovo S939, Huawei G750, Coolpad 9976A, Zopo ZP998, Goophone N3 and Doov iSuper S2. I would probably also fill you in as and when there are ways to get hold of the MT6592 USB driver and a proven successful way to root a phone featuring this new chipset.
