Mediatek takes on Exynos and Snapdragon with its Cortex A72 based SoC

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and Samsung’s Exynos 7420 chipsets have been competing against each other for some time; and soon, they will be joined by NVIDIA’s Tegra X1. MediaTek, another top chip maker, is aiming at gaining a sizable advantage over the aforementioned chipmakers with its first ever mobile chip that will be sporting ARM’s power blazing Cortex-A72 CPU; the Cortex-A72 CPU can record 4K videos at an unbelievable frame rate of 120 fps. Mediatek launched its new MT8173 chipset at the Mobile World Congress earlier this month.


ARM, the British multinational semiconductor and software design company’s Cortex A72 mobile processor will make its debut in Mediatek's MT8173 chipset. In terms of performance, the MT8173 is capable of delivering a default clock speed of up to 2.4 GHz in an octa-core package comprising of ARM’s Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 processors. The amalgamation of both CPUs in a single chipset gives evidence to ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, which combines one high-end processor with a lesser performing one in order to perfectly even out performance and energy efficiency.

MediaTek’s MT8173 will be able to provide up to six times better performance compared to the company’s MT8125 chip that was launched in 2013. In addition, it will also be able to provide 120 GHz of screen refresh rates (120 FPS) and support a camera that will possess a maximum image resolution of 20 megapixels.

In addition, the Fabless semiconductor manufacturer has stated that the memory performance of the MT8173 will also be 30% better than its predecessor. This performance spike will be extremely beneficial for users who want to perform taxing tasks such as video editing and video conversion on their smartphones.