Meet the 8-core processor that may power your next phone
Intex,
an Indian phone company will soon start selling a smartphone powered by
an 8-core processor. This new processor is made by MediaTek, a
Taiwanese company. Unlike the 8-core processor made by Samsung, which
uses only four cores at a time in Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S4, the
processor made by MediaTek can use all of its cores simultaneously.
The processor is called MT6592 and it can run at a speed of up to 2GHz. But in the phone that Intex will launch, the processor will run at the speed of up to 1.7GHz.
For now Intex is the only Indian company that has announced its intention to launch a phone powered by this 8-core processor but if past is any indication, MT6592 should soon come in other phones sold by local companies like Micromax and Spice. Currently most of the top-end phones sold by local players are powered by MT 6589, a quad-core processor made by MediaTek.
There are two key questions:
* How fast is an 8-core processor? Can it match or beat the high-end quad-core processors used by Samsung and Qualcomm?
* Does it help consumers get better experience from the phone? Do you need 8-cores in a processor?
Before we talk about MT6592, let's take a look at its specifications:
* MT6592 has 8 cores based on A7 architecture by ARM. A7 is a low-performance, low-power use architecture compared to technology used by Qualcomm and Samsung in their high-end processors.
* The processor has four cores of Mali 450 graphics chip
* MT6592 supports playback of 4K videos
* It supports new video codecs such as H.265 and VP9
* The chip supports up to 16 mega-pixel cameras
To check theoretical performance of MT6592, we ran some benchmarking apps on the Intex phone that will launch in January. The device is in prototype stage as the software running on it is not yet final. So performance figures we obtained through benchmarks are only indicative of the final performance, which is likely to be slightly better.
We used GeekBench 3, Vellamo HTML and Vellamo Metal, BrowserMark and Sunspider to find out the general computing performance.
To get an indication of gaming performance of MT6592, 3D Mark, GLBenchmark 2.7 and BaseMark X were run on the phone.
The processor is called MT6592 and it can run at a speed of up to 2GHz. But in the phone that Intex will launch, the processor will run at the speed of up to 1.7GHz.
For now Intex is the only Indian company that has announced its intention to launch a phone powered by this 8-core processor but if past is any indication, MT6592 should soon come in other phones sold by local companies like Micromax and Spice. Currently most of the top-end phones sold by local players are powered by MT 6589, a quad-core processor made by MediaTek.
There are two key questions:
* How fast is an 8-core processor? Can it match or beat the high-end quad-core processors used by Samsung and Qualcomm?
* Does it help consumers get better experience from the phone? Do you need 8-cores in a processor?
Before we talk about MT6592, let's take a look at its specifications:
* MT6592 has 8 cores based on A7 architecture by ARM. A7 is a low-performance, low-power use architecture compared to technology used by Qualcomm and Samsung in their high-end processors.
* The processor has four cores of Mali 450 graphics chip
* MT6592 supports playback of 4K videos
* It supports new video codecs such as H.265 and VP9
* The chip supports up to 16 mega-pixel cameras
To check theoretical performance of MT6592, we ran some benchmarking apps on the Intex phone that will launch in January. The device is in prototype stage as the software running on it is not yet final. So performance figures we obtained through benchmarks are only indicative of the final performance, which is likely to be slightly better.
We used GeekBench 3, Vellamo HTML and Vellamo Metal, BrowserMark and Sunspider to find out the general computing performance.
To get an indication of gaming performance of MT6592, 3D Mark, GLBenchmark 2.7 and BaseMark X were run on the phone.
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