Mediatek roadmap tells of new quad-core and octa-core chipsets for 2013


Mediatek’s chipset roadmap gives us full details of the upcoming octa-core chpset along with details of an all new quad-core processor!

Mediatek are one of the reasons why Chinese phone manufacturers are now seen as viable alternatives to big brand phone makers. Last year their dual-core MT6577 was found in many a high-end Chinese phone, and this year’s quad-core MT6589 chipset has been used by Chinese and big brand phone makers alike! (Sony and HTC to name just a few).

Obviously all eyes are on Mediatek and we are all very interested to see what the Taiwanese chipset maker have planed for the coming months.

mediatek roadmap 2013-2014 phones

Quad-core MT6582

We have already reported on the quad-core MT6582, which is basically are lower end quad-core chipset for phone with up to 1280 x 720 displays and 8 mega-pixel cameras. Clock speed will be set at 1.3Ghz on the new chip and an older Mali 400 GPU will be used to keep costs low.

The rest of the architecture seems similar to the MT6589 line up with the phone being based on a Cortex A7 28nm set up. The Mediatek MT6582 processor will be ready to ship from the 3rd quarter of 2013.

Quad-core MT6588

While the MT6582 will occupy low-end smartphones the quad-core MT6588 is targeted at high-end Chinese phones and as such boasts a faster speed, improved GPU and 28nm HKMG (High-K Metal gate) Architecture, which should improve energy efficiency in the faster quad-core SoC.

The MT6588 will use a multicore GPU from the PowerVGSGX6 range, however we don’t know for sure how many cores will be available.

MT6588 chips will launch in the final quarter of 2013.

Octa-core MT6592

Gizchina News of the week


The 8 core MT65892 will be the first 8 core processor from Mediatek and the first in the world which will allow all 8 cores to run at the same time. The MT6592 will be based on the same 28nm HKMG Cortex A7 platform as the MT6588 and with a similar multi-core GPU, however this SoC will run at 2Ghz!

Read Also:  Counterpoint Research, MTK, TECNO and Editor at Large from Forbes Magazine Compared Notes on The Changing Forces in Premium Smartphone Domain

The MT6592 and MT6588 are both designed to be used with a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 13 mega-pixel cameras, so don’t go expecting huge jumps in resolution and camera sensor size in 2014!

MT6592 chipsets will launch in the final quarter of 2013.

MT629X LTE

Nothing is really know about the LTE Mediatek chipset other than it will be 28nm based and available from the 1st quarter of 2014, but our bets are that we won’t be seeing an Octa-core version of this SoC until mid to late 2014.

mediatek roadmap tablets

MT8135 Big.Little

It’s not just smartphones which will be getting some new shiny new Mediatek hardware, tablets will also be getting some new performance and connectivity boosts also. The MT8135 will be an updated version of the current MT8125 and MT8389 quad-core chips.

The main performance advantage of the MT8135 will be the Big.Little design allowing the processor to switch between it’s Cortex A15 and A7 cores to improve energy efficiency. The new Chipset will get a similar multi-core GPU to it’s phone based counter parts and will supper up to 720p displays and 13 mega-pixel cameras.

MT8135 SoC’s will be clocked at between 1.5 and 2.Ghz and we can expect to see them delivered to manufactures by the 3rd quarter of 2013.

Mediatek in 2014

With a solid range of chipsets for both smartphones and tablets we can see that many phone makers are going to be considering Mediatek as a low-cost alternative to Nvidia and Qualcomm.

We are also going to be seeing some seriously powerful Chinese Android smartphones hit the market along with some extremely low-cost quad-core handsets! It’s an exciting time and we can’t wait to see what Chinese phone companies will do with the hardware now available to them!

Thanks to Nas for the tip!

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52 Comments

  1. Jonathan
    July 21, 2013

    Andy, what does standalone means? And about only modem ? MT6290 is not gentting built in WiFi?

  2. Smhz
    July 21, 2013

    MT65892 :O

  3. July 21, 2013

    IT’s Rogue series of GPU is gonna rock! Waiting for the MT6588 SoC’s! 😀

  4. July 21, 2013

    if MediaTek wants to play in the Big boys playroom..they are gonna have to play by the rules…they have to release their dev & kernel SOURCES>>>>all of them

    • sam (@nirvanaman_1985)
      July 21, 2013

      I agree, it is a pain not being able to have cyanogenmod for mediatek phones.

    • Ashish kumar chaubey (@Ash71ish)
      July 21, 2013

      True

      • BigboyPL
        July 21, 2013

        Well, LG relases their source always, even if they use Mediatek chip (6575 & 6577 in open source page). ZTE also provide sources but I can’t find a source page. Alcatel aslo gives a source (at sourceforge). Acer sources are also available on the web. Maybe some other manufacturers like Huawei or Lenovo has source too. Some manufacturers are uploading sources after 2 years of last produced model.

  5. sam (@nirvanaman_1985)
    July 21, 2013

    Is the resolution a typo? It keeps saying 1280×1080, surely you mean either 1280×720 or 1920×1080?

  6. samuelA
    July 21, 2013

    Chinese phones are sweet. Its a shame they don’t make ones for the US market. I am still stuck with my ZTE.
    Why can’t the Chinese manufacturer for the US? They have the technology.

  7. samuelA
    July 21, 2013

    Manufacture*

  8. math67
    July 21, 2013

    I hope te see hybrid or laptop(12-13 inch) with MT8135 chip and FHD screen <3
    Low price with good batterry life. This will be perfect to run a linux on a 250-300$ 13.3 laptop with 7-8hours of work time :3

    (i like dreaming )

  9. Partha Pratim Dutta
    July 21, 2013

    Andi, Mediatek cannot upset Qualcomm, not until Mediatek release a powerful Chip like Qualcomm 800 with LTE for global bands, at least a Q400 chip. Nvidia is also lagging behind.

    • July 21, 2013

      They don’t need to go big. I mean, the way things are going, I guess MediaTek are only behind Qualcomm and are ahead of others like Samsung’s Exynos and nVidia’s Tegra, etc.

    • Sisqo Sisternes
      July 21, 2013

      Actually, I think MediaTek is on the right track.

      When Android didn’t yet have Jelly Bean treats like Project Butter, it was expected that the only way to get it to run smoothly was to throw quad Cortex-A9 and -A15 cores at it. But these days, my MT6589 Firefly V50 with Jelly is about as responsive, if not more, than my friends’ Galaxy S3s – and actually gets better battery life. Now that Jelly Bean is pretty well optimised for performance, it seems better to have more cores that are less powerful, rather than fewer cores with more brute power.

      The MT6592 should deliver about 1.9 DMIPS/MHz x 2.0GHz x 8 cores = 30,400 DMIPS. That’s not far off from the 33,120 DMIPS of a Snapdragon 800. The Snapdragon 800 sells at the same price as the MT6592, but I’ll bet my patootie MediaTek can gain more design wins from Chinese makers than Qualcomm. And they’ve already convinced Sony to try the MT6589 in the Xperia C. It may not be long before others follow suit.

  10. Harald
    July 21, 2013

    Mediatek better fix their GPS performance

    • July 21, 2013

      I think it’s using a cheap antenna ( to small) and the ROM focus on asia pacific that poses the problems. Just put in europe.pool.ntp.org would for example solve a lot of problems for EU users.
      Also eve using an antenna just 1 mm larger would increase reception sensitivity.

      Crosscheck: no problems using outdoors. promblems using indoors= antanna problem.

      • July 21, 2013

        They have probles to fix GPS signal not only indoors also outdoors if the device is in movment. Perhaps is the antenna… but i think they should improve their GPS

  11. Coolio68
    July 21, 2013

    Your MT6582 article from a few days ago showed PowerVR SGX544 in the SoC diagram,,whereas this report says it is Mali 400. Which is correct ?

    • Eric
      October 4, 2013

      Well, test videos are showing the Mali-400 is the correct one, at least for the MT6582M.
      Funny thing is that it gets always somewhere around 16000-17000 on Antutu tests, while the supposedly superior MT6589 seems to vary a lot from phone to phone, getting scores from 12000 to 18000 with the PowerVR SGX 544MP, and there’s also a MT6589 version with the Mali-400, getting 11000-12000 results.

  12. Camaman
    July 21, 2013

    What kind of resolution is 1280x1080p in the 6589 spec sheet?
    Also those tablet cpus… I see only 8135 coming out in 3q2013 paired with 6290 coming out 1q2014 will give you internet through mobile networks.

    So nothing from the tablets in 3G+LTE before summer 2014

  13. jotapelessa
    July 21, 2013

    OMG ! Quad-core MT6582 , GPU Mali 400 will be very good for gaming

    • jedimaca
      July 22, 2013

      Forget Mali 400 sgx 6 series rouge will wipe the floor with everything maybe even adreno 330 of snapdragon 800. Been waiting a while now for 6 series powervr…. Thought I would see it first in an apple SOC. Sgx 6 series GPU is as powerful as ps3/xbox360 but using a fraction of the power and is going to Bea big jump in mobile gaming performance. I am really excited to see mediatek are going to be implenting it.

      • July 22, 2013

        We need this GPU only for games ! For a normal user this is too much!

      • Charles Dexter Ward
        December 9, 2013

        I think (or atleast i want to think) that he is being sarcastic, mali 400 is a really outdated GPU, and what mtk is doing is pairing a big (or middle engine) engine to impress people with a shitty transmision, slow shift box and tinny wheels which ultimately mean that the SoC will be bottle-necked by its own components. Also, the ps3 has a performance of 2 teraflops, while the highest end of the sgx 6 series has roughly 250 gigaflops (about 1/8), fill rate for ps3 is more than 12 gigatexels and for top sgx6xxx is roughly 7 gigatexels, Mali-T760 outperforms sgx 6xxx in everypossible way (not saying sgx 6xxx is bad), and yet is not as powerfull as the ps3 or xbox 360, every Arm compliant GPU vendor will have their high end solution, even vivante with their gc8000 has impressive specs. Mali however has the advantage of being the GPU’s designed by ARM itself.

  14. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Andy, what does standalone means? And about only modem ? MT6290 is not gentting built in WiFi?

  15. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    MT65892 :O

  16. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    IT’s Rogue series of GPU is gonna rock! Waiting for the MT6588 SoC’s! 😀

  17. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    if MediaTek wants to play in the Big boys playroom..they are gonna have to play by the rules…they have to release their dev & kernel SOURCES>>>>all of them

    • Guest
      July 21, 2013

      I agree, it is a pain not being able to have cyanogenmod for mediatek phones.

    • Guest
      July 21, 2013

      True

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      Well, LG relases their source always, even if they use Mediatek chip (6575 & 6577 in open source page). ZTE also provide sources but I can’t find a source page. Alcatel aslo gives a source (at sourceforge). Acer sources are also available on the web. Maybe some other manufacturers like Huawei or Lenovo has source too. Some manufacturers are uploading sources after 2 years of last produced model.

  18. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Is the resolution a typo? It keeps saying 1280×1080, surely you mean either 1280×720 or 1920×1080?

  19. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Chinese phones are sweet. Its a shame they don’t make ones for the US market. I am still stuck with my ZTE.
    Why can’t the Chinese manufacturer for the US? They have the technology.

  20. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Manufacture*

  21. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    I hope te see hybrid or laptop(12-13 inch) with MT8135 chip and FHD screen <3
    Low price with good batterry life. This will be perfect to run a linux on a 250-300$ 13.3 laptop with 7-8hours of work time :3

    (i like dreaming )

  22. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Andi, Mediatek cannot upset Qualcomm, not until Mediatek release a powerful Chip like Qualcomm 800 with LTE for global bands, at least a Q400 chip. Nvidia is also lagging behind.

    • Guest
      July 21, 2013

      They don’t need to go big. I mean, the way things are going, I guess MediaTek are only behind Qualcomm and are ahead of others like Samsung’s Exynos and nVidia’s Tegra, etc.

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      Actually, I think MediaTek is on the right track.

      When Android didn’t yet have Jelly Bean treats like Project Butter, it was expected that the only way to get it to run smoothly was to throw quad Cortex-A9 and -A15 cores at it. But these days, my MT6589 Firefly V50 with Jelly is about as responsive, if not more, than my friends’ Galaxy S3s – and actually gets better battery life. Now that Jelly Bean is pretty well optimised for performance, it seems better to have more cores that are less powerful, rather than fewer cores with more brute power.

      The MT6592 should deliver about 1.9 DMIPS/MHz x 2.0GHz x 8 cores = 30,400 DMIPS. That’s not far off from the 33,120 DMIPS of a Snapdragon 800. The Snapdragon 800 sells at the same price as the MT6592, but I’ll bet my patootie MediaTek can gain more design wins from Chinese makers than Qualcomm. And they’ve already convinced Sony to try the MT6589 in the Xperia C. It may not be long before others follow suit.

  23. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Mediatek better fix their GPS performance

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      I think it’s using a cheap antenna ( to small) and the ROM focus on asia pacific that poses the problems. Just put in europe.pool.ntp.org would for example solve a lot of problems for EU users.
      Also eve using an antenna just 1 mm larger would increase reception sensitivity.

      Crosscheck: no problems using outdoors. promblems using indoors= antanna problem.

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      They have probles to fix GPS signal not only indoors also outdoors if the device is in movment. Perhaps is the antenna… but i think they should improve their GPS

  24. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    Your MT6582 article from a few days ago showed PowerVR SGX544 in the SoC diagram,,whereas this report says it is Mali 400. Which is correct ?

    • Guest
      October 5, 2013

      Well, test videos are showing the Mali-400 is the correct one, at least for the MT6582M.
      Funny thing is that it gets always somewhere around 16000-17000 on Antutu tests, while the supposedly superior MT6589 seems to vary a lot from phone to phone, getting scores from 12000 to 18000 with the PowerVR SGX 544MP, and there’s also a MT6589 version with the Mali-400, getting 11000-12000 results.

  25. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    What kind of resolution is 1280x1080p in the 6589 spec sheet?
    Also those tablet cpus… I see only 8135 coming out in 3q2013 paired with 6290 coming out 1q2014 will give you internet through mobile networks.

    So nothing from the tablets in 3G+LTE before summer 2014

  26. Guest
    July 21, 2013

    OMG ! Quad-core MT6582 , GPU Mali 400 will be very good for gaming

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      Forget Mali 400 sgx 6 series rouge will wipe the floor with everything maybe even adreno 330 of snapdragon 800. Been waiting a while now for 6 series powervr…. Thought I would see it first in an apple SOC. Sgx 6 series GPU is as powerful as ps3/xbox360 but using a fraction of the power and is going to Bea big jump in mobile gaming performance. I am really excited to see mediatek are going to be implenting it.

    • Guest
      July 22, 2013

      We need this GPU only for games ! For a normal user this is too much!

    • Guest
      December 9, 2013

      I think (or atleast i want to think) that he is being sarcastic, mali 400 is a really outdated GPU, and what mtk is doing is pairing a big (or middle engine) engine to impress people with a shitty transmision, slow shift box and tinny wheels which ultimately mean that the SoC will be bottle-necked by its own components. Also, the ps3 has a performance of 2 teraflops, while the highest end of the sgx 6 series has roughly 250 gigaflops (about 1/8), fill rate for ps3 is more than 12 gigatexels and for top sgx6xxx is roughly 7 gigatexels, Mali-T760 outperforms sgx 6xxx in everypossible way (not saying sgx 6xxx is bad), and yet is not as powerfull as the ps3 or xbox 360, every Arm compliant GPU vendor will have their high end solution, even vivante with their gc8000 has impressive specs. Mali however has the advantage of being the GPU’s designed by ARM itself.

  27. R.V.RAJU
    July 22, 2013

    first of all, they said mt6589 is DUAL ACTIVE but its not & till now we cant see 2gb ram powerd like umi x2 etc. freely avilable with full stock in shops.
    so whats the use of talking about later soc? who belives them?
    without LTE support therez no scene to any soc in 2014.

  28. Guest
    July 22, 2013

    first of all, they said mt6589 is DUAL ACTIVE but its not & till now we cant see 2gb ram powerd like umi x2 etc. freely avilable with full stock in shops.
    so whats the use of talking about later soc? who belives them?
    without LTE support therez no scene to any soc in 2014.

  29. Reader
    July 25, 2013

    About Figure 1:
    Wasn’t the resolution of MT6589T 1920×1080?

  30. Guest
    July 25, 2013

    About Figure 1:
    Wasn’t the resolution of MT6589T 1920×1080?