MediaTek is primarily known as a provider of budget chips for low-end to midrange smartphones and tablets. To date, these chips have mostly been functional but unexciting—four- or eight-core designs based on ARM's Cortex A7, A17, or A53 architectures, all three of which are optimized for power consumption rather than high performance.
As MediaTek has grown, its chips have slowly become more ambitious, and today's announcement is its most interesting yet. The new 20nm Helio X20 SoC combines 10 (!) ARM CPU cores with a high-end ARM Mali GPU and a Cat 6, CDMA-compatible LTE modem. It's not going to be the fastest SoC you can buy, but two of those cores are based on the high-performance 64-bit Cortex A72 CPU architecture, suggesting that MediaTek has ambitions beyond the low-end phone market.
big.Medium.LITTLE
AnandTech reports that this 10-core CPU isn't quite like the big.LITTLE SoCs we've been seeing from MediaTek and others the past few years. The X20 (also known as the MT6797, though MediaTek is thankfully moving away from model numbers toward the clearer "Helio" branding for its SoCs) uses four 1.4GHz Cortex A53 cores for power efficiency and two 2.5GHz Cortex A72 cores for maximum performance. In between the two are four 2.0GHz Cortex A53 cores meant to balance performance and power consumption. These cores are by MediaTek's Coherent System Interconnect (MCSI for short), which may or may not be based on a standard ARM interconnect like the CCI-500.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment