MediaTek has already won a lot of accolade for the first two MT67xx series processors, the MT6732 (as seen on the Elephone P6000) and the MT6752 (as seen on the Siswoo Cooper i7 and JiaYu S3).
According to a report originating from MediaTek’s home country of Taiwan, the fabricator will be making a Cortex-A72 based chipset for smartphones, which is expected to go into mass production later this year. The 64-bit SoC will combine Cortex-A72 cores with A53 ones using the big.LITTLE technology.
As seen from the roadmap above, the SoC series will have the prefix MT679x, and will have SoCs in 20nm and 16nm flavour. It will also offer support for LTE and 3G frequencies, something that is becoming more common with each passing day — on-board modems.
There are also talks that MediaTek is looking to ditch Mali graphics processors for AMD made ones, but more details on this should appear later this year.
Considering the thundering start that MediaTek has had for 2015, do you think it will be able to carry it (or even do better) till the end of the year? Let us know of your thoughts in the comments section below.
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It kinda all gets lost in translation here.
This is Digitimes Research speculating, not fact or rumor. And so are the name and the process.
They just assume that Mediatek must have a phone SoC with A72 and it won’t be on 28nm. But it could be on 28nm , Qualcomm is doing that and Mediatek has the tab SoC with A72 on 28nm so why not. The name is not gonna be anywhere close to 679x ,would make no sense.
They have already shown a Tablet SoC based on 2x A72 & 2x A53 (big little) with G6250 based on 20nm lithography. I whose actually pleasantly surprised that it isn’t a 8-12 cores no good for nothing but 2×2 good enough for real premium user experience. As Tablets are much smaller part of market it’s logical for them to do & smartphone contra part with additional logic blocks. So what’s so unbelievable about it?
The MT8173 is on 28nm and i actually mentioned it , that’s the A72 based SoC they have on 28nm. I was well aware of it and the it’s early Geekbench and GFXbench results.
The problem with A72 on 28nm is clocks, the tab SoC will have nice perf because they can go to higher TDP but in phones they would need to dial it down. Qualcomm is going up to 1.8GHz with A72 on 28nm for the midrange and not very sure if it makes sense when you factor in perf and die area.
I also never said their expectations are unbelievable ,except for the name. About the process i said that it might not be 20nm or 16nm. We do actually know that Mediatek intended to go 20nm this year but plans could have changed , 20nm TSMC is not great and they could end up skipping it. Digitimes doesn’t dare to assume they’ll go 20 or 16 ,that’s why they list both., i just pointed out that it could also be 28nm.
It’s highly unlikely that SoC is based on 28nm lithography, it’s actually unlikely it’s even based on 20nm one. You see their is actually reasonable suspicion that it’s actually based upon 16nm FinFET (that actually have 20nm base) as Synopsis routed A72 for it. Media Tek didn’t actually released any information about actual used manufacturing process. So I presume you are fantasizing or herd it thru the grape vine. You know that actual routing takes couple of months & they actually already showed it & are sampling it.
“We had a discussion with MediaTek about this first A72 SoC for tablets
(that we are aware of), and the company’s representatives confirmed that
this is a 28nm chip made at TSMC.”
Would still took Fudzilla with more than grain of salt. Truth is we can only speculate as we don’t really even know about architectural changes concerning A72. ARM took us (public) by surprise all do industry partners did know it much earlier so everything is possible. Still some things just don’t fit in that story; first is relatively hi clock rate (2.4GHz) & second the MTK is not actually known to go far away from main stream. Synopsis did only confirm that it routed it for 16nm so far & not so long ago so it’s not hi likely MTK routed it & have it on silicon in such a short time besides all other announcement’s are tied for 16nm.
The MT8173 is on 28nm, there is no real debate there and that’s why it’s just dual A72 and aimed at tabs.
From a cost perspective it also doesn’t make sense to a make a midrange tablet SoC on an advanced process. If you are gonna pay for the process you need something that can sell at a premium and midrange is not that.
On 16ff+ we should see 2.4GHz and above quad A72 in phones but it’s not time for that just yet.
I think MT8173 could suit smartphones even at 28nm.
It’s GPU half of Iphone 6’s and seems not clocked to high frequencies.
It’s CPU delivers close scores to Exynos 5433. Would have equivalent if Samsung update it to 64-bit Android.
MT8173 is clocked high and has no modem, If you add modem you add heat and A72 is aimed at 16nm. Qualcomm is going A72 28nm for the midrange but at much lower clocks and ofc Mediatek could do the same.
I could be wrong but considering MT8173, Snapdragon 620’s 1.8GHz A72 performance should be around same level with MT6795’s 2.2GHz A53.
Even with modem it could be fine. A72’s power consumption is less than A57 at same node and it’s just dual core A72.
We don’t really know power consumption and die size on same node and btw i was actually arguing that it could be on 28nm, not against it.
In the end this was just Digitimes speculating so it’s all pretty pointless.
EDIT: Just remembered that there is a MT8163 that showed up in a couple of benchmarks . GFXbench sees it as A57 but they identify the 8173 as A57 too so it’s unreliable. The GPU is listed as Sapphire-LT (or something like that) and hard to say what that is , could be AMD i guess.