http://liliputing.com/2015/01/rumor-mediatek-considering-10-12-core-mobile-ch...Mediatek reacts to free Win 8.1 and other upscale forces.Artemis and Maya (ARM) has been privately released now to just about all the major players at this stage of the game. The minor players have gotten wind of it through contacts and are scooping up inexpensive 64 bit A53 LITTLE core licenses and ALL OF THEM are putting out a full spread of new A53 multi-core chipsets (up to 8 cores).
Only Qualcomm and Samsung have the more traditional A57/A53 big/LITTLE setups out in the wild at this point in time. Way way overpowered and pretty much not needed, actually.
Mediatek is a strong oriental supplier who feels the need for a good scaleable top end offering to be coming on pretty soon -- so they are going with either a 10 core or a 12 core A53 "LITTLES only" to make up their bill.
Sounds like Mediatek is counting on proposed new Maya core scheduling/integration software in Android 5.1 to allow Android 5.1 to make good use of all those cores.Intel had better watch out -- Wintel's PC level integration ability of "many cores" gets kinda shaky after 6 cores whereas Linux (and Android, a type of Linux) can run very efficiently on supercomputers with HUNDREDS & HUNDREDS of cores, with different types of cores to boot Intel is currently stuck at 4 cores on all of their current lower end processors and although they are larger more powerful cores they don't outshine an A53 by double over or anything close to that.
You can see Mediatek, Allwinner and Qualcomm's logic runs like this -- we already own the license for the little guy, they are physically tiny little things on 16/20nm chip silicon and you can put up to 24 of them in a totally integrated chipset (if you want to) and the scaled up and down energy burden of all the extra little guys at 16/20nm is less than a 50%-50% mix of bigs and LITTLES of some smaller total core count that gives about the same throughput.
Plus, it gives Mediatek a quickly implementable chipset for Chromebooks and also potentially for little Windows 10 laptops and boxes if such a market suddenly gets opened up by a really really good Windows 10 that can really handle some "mobile core count".
No one knows (not even MS at this stage of the game) just how good Win 10 is going to be.
Rest easy that ARM/Linaro/Google/processor makers are working in lock step with the new 5.1 Android which will be carrying full integration with the new upcoming Artemis and Maya chipset features.
At some point in time in the second half of this year Intel will have to declare what's going to be in Skylake because they will have to either be making it & shipping it to Apple by then or else be totally out of luck at that stage of the game.
Intel and ARM's final announcements will come out within a week of each other. Until then, ARM/Google keeps quiet and keeps on doing .dot revs on their existing chipsets and software -- rolling in more new functionality without making any big fuss about it.
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