Mediatek MT6592 8 core processors coming by the end of July!


Reports out of Taiwan state that Mediatek will launch the MT6592 8-core processor by the end of July.

There was word that Mediatek were working on an 8 core chipset late last year, but like many we believed it had been placed on the back burner while they prepared their LTE chip. This seems to be wrong though as sources in Taiwan claim that Mediatek’s 8-core processor will arrive before the end of this month!

Gizchina News of the week


The MT6592 chip will be made up of 8 Cortex-A7, 28nm processor clocked at a frequency of up to 2Ghz! Early tests have the 8 core MT6592 scoring up to 30,000 points in Antutu which is more than Samsung’s 8 core Exynos 5410 processor.

The first batch of these new processors will be ready for manufacturers to begin development by the end of July, while Mediatek are preparing full-scale manufacture for November!

If everything goes to plan we can expect powerful 8 core phones from Tier 1 Chinese phone manufacturers by December!

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46 Comments

  1. July 2, 2013

    June or July? 🙂 we are already in July Andi

    • July 2, 2013

      Yup July sorry 😉

  2. July 2, 2013

    Great…:-). Eagerly waiting to get one 8 Core Android phone.

  3. Fikri
    July 2, 2013

    oh s**t
    extreme processor will coming

    i hope some manufacture create waterproof phone using this chip
    ( i used Lenovo a660 and k-touch u9 {blu tank 4.5}) still dual core 🙁

  4. John
    July 2, 2013

    I would like to see 2x ARM15, than 8x A7.

  5. Chav
    July 2, 2013

    Why should we care about 256-core phones? :S

    • July 2, 2013

      If you don’t, why do you read GizChina then?

    • July 7, 2013

      higher performance with lower power consuption. so simple

  6. J-Bird
    July 2, 2013

    Issue with this is that while it looks nice on paper the real world performance will not be that great. There aren’t a lot of apps that require eight cores and the ones that do are usually games that are generally hindered by badly performing GPU’s. The increase in clockspeed might in practice be the biggest performance increaser.

    • fonix232
      July 2, 2013

      Well, while most of the apps indeed won’t use all the cores, threading comes in. Meaning, we can have even better multitasking, and apps running in the background without causing lag on the current screen.

      So basically – more cores->better multitasking->lower CPU usage->better battery life with better user experience.

      • lit
        July 26, 2013

        Is that a fact? I dont notice that much a difference in power consumption with dual and quads. Talking about substantial difference like quads having 5 hrs or more juice than duals.

  7. k86
    July 2, 2013

    Things should be very interesting this winter.

    • Matt
      July 2, 2013

      WINTER IS COMING

      • Natsumi
        July 2, 2013

        LOL!!! XDDD

  8. Hoang
    July 2, 2013

    WUHU NICE BUDDY! Is there also a Multi GPU?
    If yes, I just fell in love

    • cpaun
      July 2, 2013

      Yup, I agree. I think the biggest problem of MT6589 (Turbo or not) is it’s single core GPU (though it’s a PowerVR 544 it has only one core, compared to S4 for instance which is PowerVR 544 MP3, meaning 3 cores).

      • abel
        July 2, 2013

        and its clocked at a much higher speed !

  9. Navdeep singh
    July 2, 2013

    one day the phone will come with a processor with crores of cores in it…..and we will launch a sattilite from home…..m i right andy???………hahahahahahaahahah

  10. BaSch
    July 2, 2013

    I dont believe it is a 8 core prozessor with 8 Cortex A7, for sure it will be a 4/4 core prozessor with four A7 and four A15, like Samsung Exynos 5410.

    We can expect phones in december?
    The same december we expected the MT6589 Phones in 2012?
    I dont believe that, too.

    • July 2, 2013

      The big little architecture can be implemeted in two ways. The first being a 4/4 architecture while the second can have all 8 running at once. With having 8 a7 should be more cost effective then with a15

    • July 2, 2013

      Judging by Baidu, it’s true. I personally think it could be better than 4+4, because I’d rather prefer 8 A7 cores running at low clock rate than 4 A15 cores nearly melting.

      One day I’ll buy used Nexus 4, overclock it to the maximum and iron my pants with it.

      • July 7, 2013

        hahahahahahhhahah. i like a galaxy s2 for heater at winter

  11. July 2, 2013

    I believe the all phones will be 5+ inches, which is very big on my hands
    🙁

    And I do not hope this will come with phones in November :/
    2014 May maybe??

    Phones mostly will be 300$+..
    ram 3 or 4 Gb…

    Very long time 🙁

  12. Victor
    July 2, 2013

    I think if this processor can beat Exynos batt life , major brand phone maker will turn to Mediatek ! My fav processor so far.. anyone agree ?

    • July 2, 2013

      Antutu scores are usually faked, don’t believe all you see. We also don’t know the whole SoC, just a bit of the CPU details, so…

      Battery life should be on par with the Exynos with light usage. Also, don’t expect too see many phones with these SoC outside of Chinese manufacturers.

      Let’s wait and see…

      • July 2, 2013

        I don’t really think they’re faked, but at least they should be thoroughly examined by each component. AnTuTu’s real downside is that more than half of the score is CPU’s performance.
        Look up Samsung Ativ Q on google for a good example of badly balanced performance.

    • July 2, 2013

      I’ll agree if it has good GPU. Let’s cross our fingers for newer PowerVR or Mali GPU.

      But still, this is the most decent processor I’ve seen so far.

  13. sam (@nirvanaman_1985)
    July 2, 2013

    i wish meditek would make a quad cortex a15 processor already!

  14. Greg Zeng
    July 2, 2013

    Multiple cpu’s can be misleading. Some sellers include the GPU in the counting of CPUs. Often the manufacturer slows the CPU(s) to try to have a longer battery life, or robs the other parts of the phone from getting a full supply of power.

    I’ve seen a review of a phone CPU, where half the CPUs are turned off when the other half are turned on; a way of optimizing battery consumption or power. Often the apps and the operating systems cannot handle the power or complexity of the hardware yet. It takes a long while before the software coders can use most new hardware in computers (& phones).

  15. nick
    July 2, 2013

    30,000 on atutu? what? then i think by the end of this year, China Brand Smartphone> Global brand Smartphone Plastic phone. I think you know what brand i mean 🙂

    • Ace
      July 2, 2013

      The glossy finish on that brand is really nice though.
      We need some better glass, Oleophobic coatings and OLED displays rather than more numbers.

  16. Ace
    July 2, 2013

    This is kinda sad news.
    Instead of making a more power-efficient dual a7/dual a12 architecture they went all out and made an OCTACORE.

    Hey, why not, let’s see those 1440p displays and those 10Ah batteries already.

    • July 2, 2013

      MediaTek is already working on that too. The thing is that even by december it will already stop being cutting edge. Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 will already be mass s[read, and also 64-bit ARM will be around the corner.
      I seriously doubt A7/A12 config will be put anywhere except budget phones in early 2014.

    • Mariner
      July 2, 2013

      The Cortex-A12 was only announced a month ago and it isn’t expected that devices containing this design will be available until late 2014 or early 2015 so a big.LITTLE chip with the A12 is not a possibility.

      I’d be happy to see a quad-core A7 running at 2Ghz on the 28nm process, perhaps with an SGX 544 MP2? That would make a very good mid-range chipset though I’m guessing the additional SGX core would take up too much die space.

  17. wurstt
    July 2, 2013

    Oh crap, I want this, but I waited long enough.
    I’m just going to buy a MT6589T phone during my vacation and buying another phone in 2 years. Maybe a 12nm 8 Core Cortex-A57 with 4Ghz Turbo boost by Mediatek which would run Crysis 3 on a Desktop with the same power consumption as A7????? 😀

    But for now I only need a phone for music, internet browsing and guess what: telephony.^^
    For gaming and other stuff I still have a decent tablet.

  18. lukis
    July 2, 2013

    Where is about new MT6588 (quad*1.7GHz) from the same Chinese source?

  19. July 2, 2013

    2 things…
    1. they had better not put in a messed up GPU …like they did on mtk6589
    2. MediaTek had better release their sources soon to also modding and overclocking of thier cpu’s and gpu’s

  20. Robert S
    July 2, 2013

    8 threads is overkill delux, you have no use at all of that.
    Would rather se a BIGlittle or a dual/quad A15.
    In fact a dual A15 is well enough today. The thing i want to get better is the GPU and it sucks that Samsung was so stupid to go with the PowerVR GPU in their quad core Exynos 5. The Mali in their dual core Exynos 5 is more powerfull and i had hoped that they would go with an even more powerfull Mali GPU in their quad core… but no… sucks…

    • July 2, 2013

      Depending on the benchmark, the PowerVR chip in the SGS4 Exynos is either slightly faster than (in Gfxbench 2.5) or very slightly slower than (Gfxbench 2.7) the Mali T604 in the Nexus 10.

      Bearing in mind that the Nexus 10 has a higher power envelope to work with than the SGS4 and it wouldn’t appear that going with the PowerVR chip was such a bad idea?

      If anything else, it would indicate that the Mali isn’t able to operate with low enough power to be used in a phone.

  21. GJL
    July 2, 2013

    I think people are forgetting that the R&D costs to develop and the time to bring new architecture to production is extremely expensive, often prohibitively so.

    Whats going to be your selling point to the man on the street (not techy’s)? Well it’s cores. What is the cheapest method for the company to do this? Well just drop two chips on one die.

    So you double the cores, double the memory pipelines and double the GPU. A whole new product line to push to a higher sector than your quadcore products. Now you have new revenue coming in, keeping (increasing market share) and having money to put towards the next R&D project.

    So in essence diversifying your product to the maximum markets is whats needed to survive on these low margin lines.

  22. Camaman
    July 2, 2013

    Maybe now somebody will finaly make a decent, high res 3G tablet by years end…

  23. HansSchmitt
    July 3, 2013

    You’ll be able to buy these phones in Q1 2014. The MT6589 was supposed to be released in November 2012, too, but decent phones were available in Spring 2013.
    This all sounds great but next year there will be phones like the Samsung S5 with new Snapdragon chips that will dwarf any Mediatek chip. They’re always almost one year behind. And btw, Qualcomm is going to release new low-cost chips to counter Mediatek which might be better (developing and no bugs)

  24. July 3, 2013

    I don’t think the term “octocore” is appropriate. There may be 8 cores involved, but they are not organized into a single module. Im quite convinced, that this is rather going to be a 4+4 system using either 4 big powerful but more hungry cores (probably Cortex A9) for more demanding tasks and 4 less powerful but also less hungry ones (probably A7) for other tasks.

    • Marc
      July 18, 2013

      You are wrong. As the article says, this is a true octocore : 8 * Cortex A7 cores.

      Maybe you should read instead of making crazy assumptions.

  25. Mariner
    July 4, 2013

    I read speculation on another forum that this chip is a 4+4 but between two clusters of Cortex A7s where each cluster can be clocked at differing levels or shut down altogether. Fundamentally, you’d then have a quad-core chip which could operate as octa-core when required.

    How much additional performance the extra cluster could provide, I don’t know. I wouldn’t imagine there are too many apps that would benefit from 8 threads operating at the same time!

    I’d sort of hope that the 6592 would have a faster GPU (possibly an SGX544MP2) but this may take up too much die space.

    In fact, if the 6592 really is clocked at 2GHz, I’d prefer to have a chip with a quad-core A7 but a faster GPU.

    I wonder if the 6588 also mentioned (or 6588T in due course) will provide this?