A couple days has passed since we last broke the news regarding MT6595, and already we have several updates for the MTK6595 SoC.
In the comments of the previous MT6595 post, I wrote that I guessed MT6595 may come out in Q3/Q4 2014. Though initially China news touted MT6595 as coming in first half of 2014, they are now more in line with reality saying MT6595 will be released some time in Q3/Q4.
ARM on the other hand is not so optimistic with the schedule. Quote from ARM – “the Cortex-A17 processor is primed to bring the high-end performance levels of 2014 to next generation mid-range devices in 2015”. ARM is basically touting here that the mid-range devices of 2015 will be equal to the high-end devices of 2014. Which is great, and we think very doable.
The important nugget in that quote is “2015”, which hints that their schedule for Cortex-A17 has it landing some time in 2015. This makes sense, as generally we don’t see the new MediaTek SoC come out until a couple months after the ever optimistic China news predicts. This is also in line with previous MediaTek SoC / CPU releases which are generally spaced about a year apart give or take a couple months.
China news also reports phone manufacturer’s will reportedly receive the final prototypes sometime in the first half of 2014, and there is some hope MT6595 will make an appearance at CITE (China Electronic Information Expo) in April, but given the “2015” statement by ARM, sounds overly optimistic.
The other thing to remember is that ARM and MediaTek both manufacture out of Taiwan, so it’s possible MediaTek may gain early access to production level Cortex-A17 for their MTK6595 prior to the rest of the pack. A long-shot at best, but still a shot.
As already discussed, the MT6595 will feature 4 Cortex-A17 cores + 4 Cortex-A7 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration which allows the Cortex-A17 to handle load when CPU use is heavy, while the more power-efficient Cortex-A7 will handle the load when CPU use is light.
What wasn’t previously discussed was speed. As of now, ARM states expected speeds of Cortex-A17 will be “beyond 2.0+ GHz”, which is right in line with current China news that’s reporting MT6595 will be “2.2-2.5GHz”. The Cortex-A7 in this configuration is scheduled to run at 1.7GHz. The manufacturing process will be 28nm.
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