Mediatek Smartphone and Tablet SoC Product Line (Mess) Explained

This week-end, I have been tipped about a $91 Mediatek MT8317 based 7″ Phablet, but I really did not know what to think about it as Mediatek seems to have so many SoCs, and really felt lazy trying to dig information about this. Yet, in the back of my head, I had decided to eventually make a post trying to clarifying Mediatek SoCs. This morning, I felt relieved not to have to spend hours investigating, as AndroidPC.es found an analyst paper doing just that, at least for recent and upcoming Mediatek processors.

Mediatek Smartphone SoCs Roadmap

MT6589 is certainly the most common SoC for cheap quad core smartphones, and starting this month, it will be available in MT6589M and MT6589T versions, the former with a weak video processing unit (VPU) and ISP, and GPU frequency, and the latter with higher GPU and CPU frequencies. Contrary to the table below, MT6589 and MT6589T support 1080p displays, whereas MT6589M supports 960×540 resolution (Source: gizchina). MT6592 Octa-core Cortex A7 @ 2.0GHz, and MT6588 quad core Cortex A7 @1.7GHz are coming for the end of the year with PowerVR Series 6 GPU. The analyst estimates MT6592 may have performance close to Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 application processor.

On the low-end of the product line, Mediatek provides MT6582 and MT6572, quad or dual Cortex A7 SoC with ARM Mali-400 GPU. All new Mediatek are based on Cortex A7 with 28nm process, so the company seems to have “fallen in love” with this particular core, and strangely has not planned any big.LITTLE smartphone SoC. MT629X in the table above is not a smartphone SoC, but just an LTE modem.

Mediatek Dual and Quad Core Tablet SoCs

On the tablet front, we’ve got MT8377 and MT8137 dual core Cortex A9 processors, both of which will soon be phased out, as well as two quad core Cortex A7 SoC MT8389 and MT8125, the former with mobile connectivity, and the latter without.

Mediatek MT8135, a quad core Cortex A15 + A7 processor with big.LITTLE processing, should be made available in Q3 2013. It does not come with built-in mobile connectivity, but can be paired with MT629X LTE modem. All Mediatek tablet SoCs feature a PowerVR SGX GPU, with MT8135 boasting a new Power SGX6XX GPU.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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