Way back in 2012 the SoC name for what is now MT6589 was to be MT6588. MediaTek did a switcharoo and MT6589 is what we ended up with. Now in 2014, MTK has taken the MT6588 name off the shelf and applied it to their just released SoC – The 4-core MTK6588.
The MT6588 has been on the charts as long as MT6592, but it wasn’t until just now that phones are beginning to show up with this SoC. Whether it was because MediaTek wanted to showcase their 8-core MT6592 for a bit, or simply because MT6588 just wasn’t ready yet is unknown.
Though in some ways the MT6588 is similar to MT6582, the MT6588 is actually closer kin to MT6592 — just a little brother version. GPU will be the same, standard CPU frequency will be the same and resolution support will be the same.
That’s not to say there aren’t several differences between MT6592 and MT6588. The most obvious difference is CPU which will be pared down to 4-core. The Mali-450 MP4 will be stepped down to 600MHz as opposed to 700MHz and the L2 cache will be 512KB vs. 1MB. Also, the MT6588 maximum frequency will be 1.7GHz compared to a maximum of 2.0GHz in MT6592.
There is some speculation that MT6588 may become the SoC of choice in near future budget phones, replacing the MT6582, but this remains to be seen. There has been significant battery life issues with MT6592, most notably with 1080p phones. Let’s hope the MT6588 does it a step or two better than MT6592 did. The Gionee E7 Mini is just being released and will be the first phone with MT6588, so we’ll be following this phone very closely to gain insight on MT6588 chipset performance.
Leave a Reply