MediaTek announced its breakthrough MT8135


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ShleeDragon

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MediaTek announced its breakthrough MT8135 system-on-chip (SoC) for high-end tablets. The quad-core solution incorporates two high-performance ARM Cortex™-A15 and two ultra-efficient ARM Cortex™-A7 processors, and the latest GPU from Imagination Technologies, the PowerVR™ Series6 G6200 (OpenGL ES 3) with Miracast wireless video.

This chip looks pretty awesome... 

http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/29/mediatek-mt8135-biglittle-mp-powervr-series6-g6200/

Ed.. make some calls  ;)

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http://www.mediatek.com/_en/Event/201307_TrueOctaCore/tureOcta_.php

GET HYPED!...
 
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Where can I get an ARM-based device suitable for octa-threaded software?
 
Given the ARMH roadmaps that companies are going to go there was inevitable, but that's a little faster then I thought. This should help put more pressure on other firms that are being slow to adopt big.LITTLE and OpenGL ES 3.0 compatible GPUs.
 
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Well a bit of competition from the Chinese is going to be interesting,  Wont be to long before they are on par with western offerings but probably a lot cheaper.

I saw an article a little while ago which said that the RK3188 is being sold for only $12 in volumes of 100,000  , different prices at smaller/larger volumes. Id imagine SOCs from the west would be a lot more than that.
 
vcoleiro said:
Well a bit of competition from the Chinese is going to be interesting,  Wont be to long before they are on par with western offerings but probably a lot cheaper.

I saw an article a little while ago which said that the RK3188 is being sold for only $12 in volumes of 100,000  , different prices at smaller/larger volumes. Id imagine SOCs from the west would be a lot more than that.
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MTK socs are a lot more expensive than that. Mediatek is a Taiwanese company that is specialized in making lite chips with great android support and very reliable quality.

It is super popular among those nameless smartphone manufactures because it's quality makes up for its high price. 

I would argue that mediatek is comparable with more well-known soc providers such as samsung, and TI. The few drawbacks wiith MTK are that,

1. It only makes A7 based chips, they have little interest in more battery demanding chips. 

2. It has no support for linux what so ever, but it has excellent android support: MTK based android phones are very stable and turns on quickly.

3. Expensive. (still a lot cheaper than samsung stuffs)

I would not recommend using socs made by other Chinese providers though. Last time I checked, almost all of them have a high failure rate, bad battery time and awful support. They may look good on paper, but they aren't worthy to be put into an expensive product like P2.
 
Rockchip have come a long way, they are pretty good these days and have even started supporting Linux.

As for MTK, they are now making Cortex A15 chips as per this story, see the opening post
 
I too think this would be a great chip for a Pandora-like device. The Cortex-A7s can keep up with anything the current Pandora can and do so while using less power, while the A15s give a good extra kick for a few demanding things (DS, PSP, Saturn, Dreamcast emulation.. maybe more). The GPU is also compelling; it probably won't be the very fastest thing available but pretty competitive and with an excellent feature set. Integrated wifi and bluetooth would be great to have too, not to mention Miracast.

I don't think MTK is going to be expensive at all, although probably not as cheap as Chinese stuff. Given how much random lower volume stuff you can find them in there's a good chance it'll be available through distributors. Besides that, "expensive" for an SoC here would be like $30, hardly breaking the bank for a hypothetical Pandora 2 BOM. But chances are good even this will be less than $20 - it's made on the same process as Tegra 4 which is 80mm^2, but should be decently smaller due to only having 2 Cortex-A15s instead of 5.
 
Yeah. I've been looking and found very little previous support for MT SOCs on linux dev boards or anything like that. I'm sure it's all under the NDA doco.. but I cannot find much talk on any mailing lists and such.

Are we going to find ourselfs with horrible drivers and outdated userland quickly?
 
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To be fair Jollo did create a solution for Wayland to use Android SoC drivers as part of their Mer related phone development. Given proper Wayland compliant compositors should appear in a few months, the question would seem to be related more to Mer and KDE's* timetables versus potential production timetables.  So the situation isn't quite as problematic if using X11 is avoided in favor of XWayland and native Wayland clients.

Based on the Raspberry Pi switching to Wayland over the old X11 server also significantly reduces the RAM footprint and software overhead leading to increased performance.  The XWayland client in turn being designed to help prevent the issue of software breaking due to dropping the X11 Server.

*LXDE is piggybacking off KDE's efforts along these lines so the obvious options would be that eventual version of LXDE or KDE based on Qt5 with things like PlasmaActive allowing additional interface options.
 
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Askarus said:
Shouldn't we get an octa core instead of quad core?

(Octa = 4 A15)
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The only current ARM 4/4 core setup is the Samsung Exynos 5410/5420 and the Korean half of Samsung already made it clear they're not interested, so it's not in play.  Note that the Exynos 5410/5420 is intended to switch between the A7s and A15s.  In other words it's designed to handle 4 threads while switching between high efficiency and higher performance cores where the performance/power point makes sense*.

The MediaTek MT8135 appears to be setup similar to the MT8125 based on the coverage.  That's to say it plugs in cores as needed for up to 4 threads.  If it handles like Anandtech was observing with the MT8125 then it'll plug in core 3 during the performance ramp, and core 4 will plug in and out as called for.  So like the Exynos 5410/5420 it should handle up to 4 threads. 

It should be noted that the MediaTek MT8135 follows the ARMH guidelines more closely as far as handsets, which is influenced by expected thermals.  That's going to tend to mean that the MediaTek MT8135 is probably better able to maintain higher clocks on the A15s and/or realize higher clocks.  MediaTek's core plugging in/out strategy should also help with realizing good battery life, and makes it a good option of the options likely open to a project like this.

*The Cortex A15 actually loses in terms of raw performance to the Cortex A7 until there's enough power in play.
 
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Out of topic but just wanted to say this:

I'm a software guy but I work at a place where we also do hardware. It has never interested me that much but hearing you guys talk about all those new technologies as gotten me interested. Now I wish I had taken more hardware courses back at university.
 
It is never too late to learn. Just listening to Exophase and Jebe banter has taught me a lot :D
 
I've spoken with somebody and been informed that Mediatek give zero fucks about the linux environment. So they'll likely never want to support the OP2 :|

We could hope they change their mind.
 
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ShleeDragon said:
I've spoken with somebody and been informed that Mediatek give zero fucks about the linux environment. So they'll likely never want to support the OP2 :|

We could hope they change their mind.
Click to expand...
See?  We're outcasts to them  :D .  But how can we change their mind?
 
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