The mobile chipset leaderboards is currently being dominated by the likes of NVIDIA's Tegra X1, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and Samsung's Exynos 7420 chipset. However, fabless semiconductor manufacturing company MediaTek will be looking to find a place amongst them with the release of the company's MT8173 chipset. The MT8173 will be running ARM's Cortex-A72 processor, which has been reported by Engadget to be able to record 4K resolution videos at an outstanding frame rate of 120 FPS.
The unreleased MT8173 chipset will be running an octa-core processor that will not only be compatible with the 64 bit architecture but will also be running using ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. With this architecture, the processor will be able to deliver the ideal balance of processing power and energy efficiency by pairing a lesser performing CPU with a high performing one. In the MT8173, the processors forming the octa-core package will be ARM's Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 and each core will be able to deliver a clock speed up to 2.4 GHz.
In pure performance terms, MediaTek's MT8173 is able to provide up to six times the performance of the company's MT8125 chipset, a product that was launched back in 2013. In addition to superior processing, efficiency and video recording capabilities, the chip will also be able to provide support for a camera whose maximum image resolution goes up to 20 megapixels. Addionally, according to WCCFtech, the MT8173 will be able to deliver up to a 30 percent increase in memory performance.
While MediaTek has not stated when the first devices running the company's chipset will be released, it is expected that they will most be launched during 2016, since ARM's Cortex-A72 CPU will also be released during that time period. To combat the prowess of the Cortex-A72 processor, Qualcomm will be unveiling its Snapdragon 820 SoC, which is expected to running a processor based on the company's superior 'Taipan' architecture.
