Once seen as dormant and feeble, Mediatek chipsets have come a long way from powering low-cost cloned devices to being used in Sony and LG smartphones, and now enjoy much greater acceptance worldwide, more than ever before. This has made other internationally-renown fabricators like Qualcomm feel the heat, and the need to take action. There’s no doubt that Qualcomm follow Mediatek’s developments closely, we’ve even been treated to a witty response from them.
Mediatek came up with the MT6577 dual core processor last year, which essentially was the first dual-core to be featured in the budget segment. It was only after this launch that we started seeing low-cost Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8225 powered devices on the shore, which can be seen as a reaction to Mediatek’s stimulus.
However, with the quad core MT6589 and subsequently MT6589T, Mediatek threatened not only entry-level and mid-range, but high-end dominance as well; which has prompted Qualcomm to look further and come up with a competitor of their own. Reportedly, this very competitor from Qualcomm, known as the MSM8228 is already in the testing phase!
Qualcomm MSM8228 key features
- 1.4GHz quad core, with Cortex A7 cores
- 28nm manufacturing process
- 450MHz Adreno 305 GPU
- Support for 1080p displays and 13 mega-pixel cameras
- On-board modem with 4G LTE and dual SIM support
Not only this, the upcoming chipset also boasts better power management, with up to 30% more efficiency when compared to other Cortex A7 based processors. Here’s how the chipset fares:
We have to admit, with more than 18,000 points on AnTuTu, the MSM8228 might be just what the doctor ordered for Qualcomm; support for 4G LTE would mean that Qualcomm gain an upper hand (Mediatek too are reported to be working on a 4G LTE chipset).
We don’t know for sure when we will be able to see MSM8228 powered devices. However, Qualcomm have just sparked off a very interesting battle which promises to make smartphones more affordable than ever before!
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I for one would opt for this over the MT6589 if the price of the resulting phone is about the same.
None of the MT6589T phones I have used (Jiayu G4, Zopo C2, iOcean X7 Youth Turbo) feel “fast”. There is always some lag, especially in the graphics department. And MediaTek’s GPS support is atrocious, I hate having to use MobileUncle Tools just to make it work.
I think cortex A7, the low budget CPU architecture, is to blame for that. It sacrifices performance consistency for raw throughput. On that note I don’t expect this thing to be much better.
Cortex A7 won’t perform so well on 1080p screens with the single core gpu version of sgx544. On that note I can see this chip performing better due to the better gpu. On a 720p screen this will be ideal…I’m looking forward to it in the note 3 neo dual if the price drops to sub US 500.