MediaTek announced the 64-bit LTE SoC MT6732 at the MWC 2014 as a competitor to Qualcomm’s 64-bit Snapdragon 410 in the mid-range market.
MediaTek’s new LTE capable system-on-chip (SoC) comes with 1.5GHz quad-core CPU based on 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 architecture, a highly advanced 16-core Mali-T760 GPU that supports modern graphics APIs, and an integrated multi-mode 4G LTE modem.
The Cortex-A53 aimed at the lower-end of the performance spectrum utilises the ARMv8 instruction set, a more important feature compared to the 64-bit.
“Technology moves in cycles, and it just turns out the timing of the 6732. The ARM 64-bit A53 was ready to be commercialized, so this chip intersected with that,” said Mohit Bhushan, MediaTek’s VP and General Manager for US Corporate Marketing to ARS.
“One thing is for sure; that all follow-on designs from there will most likely be 64-bit … [The higher-end Cortex A57] is also going to be part of our designs in the future.”
The Mali-T760 GPU supports OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenCL 1.2, and also features power-saving technologies like ARM Frame Buffer Compression and Smart Composition that cuts power cost by up to 50 percent.
T-760 GPU, ARM claims, provides for 400 percent increase in energy efficiency compared to the previous generation Mali-T604 chip.
The other big thing is the 4G LTE modem that provides up to 150Mbps download speeds and 50Mbps upload speeds and the 3G/DC-HSPA+ network speeds at 42Mbps down-link and 11Mbps up-link.
Apart from MT6732, MediaTek is also announced MT3188, a wireless charging chip and MT6630, a standalone wireless chip that offers connectivity for single-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and FM radio connectivity.
The company also revealed that over 220 million chipsets for smartphones and 20 million chipsets for tablets were shipped in the year 2013 and it is planning to increase the figures to 300 million and 40 million respectively in 2014.
