After announcing the availability of their 64-bit server chips in the Cortex A53 and A57 two years ago, MediaTek has now revealed their scaled down version for smartphones in the MT6732. Like most of the other chips made by the company, this new offering will be aimed at the “super mid market” for smartphones.
Complemented by a Mali-T760 GPU from ARM, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and 150Mbps down/50Mbps up LTE support, the MT6732 includes a 1.5 quad-core processor based on the lower end Cortex A53 architecture. This is notably less capable than the new 32-bit Cortex A17 architecture that was announced earlier this month. MediaTek reasons that this is because the timing for the A53 is right, despite the fact that it still uses many 32-bit components that run on ARMv7 instead of the new ARMv8. It could simply be that MediaTek wanted to beat the competition to the announcement, and whether that will affect the future performance of the chip remains to be seen.
The company also announced a new wireless charging chip that will be offered with both Mediatek SoC and paired with other vendors. The MT3188 will be compatible with Wireless Power Consortium’s Qi, the competing PMA standard from the Power Matters Alliance, the “Rezence” resonant charging standard from the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) and a few other wireless charging standards that have not been mentioned.
MediaTek’s MT6732 will only be powering devices in 2015, so there is still a long time to go before they start turning up.
[source: Ars Technica]
