Earlier this year, Taiwanese chip maker MediaTek announced it was working on designing an ARM Cortex-A15 chip with big.LITTLE technology. This week, MediaTek confirmed it had also licensed ARM’s Cortex-A50 technology.
As Liliputing’s Brad Linder notes, this means the industry could soon be seeing devices powered by 32-bit or 64-bit ARMv8 chips from MediaTek in 2014.
“MediaTek has sort of come out of nowhere in the past year or two, producing a series of low-power, moderate performance processors for smartphones and tablets,” Linder explained.
“Soon the company’s chips might be competitive with those from big-name companies such as Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia.”
Although MediaTek powers a plethora of phones and tablets in China, a number of major industry heavyweights, such as Lenovo and Acer, have begun using MediaTek chips in their entry level tablets.
MediaTek’s new ARM-based chips will undoubtedly help enable the company target middle tier devices and ultimately, high-end tablets and smartphones.
