After becoming one of the leading suppliers of system-on-chips for inexpensive Chromebooks, MediaTek wants to address the market for Windows on Arm PCs. To meet Windows users’ performance expectations, MediaTek plans to develop SoCs with enhanced CPU and GPU performance, the company reiterated this week.
“With CPUs and GPUs, we need to make a bigger investment for basic functionality. [for PC-oriented SoCs]said Vince Hu, Corporate Vice President of MediaTek at the company’s event. PC World (opens in new tab).
MediaTek’s Kompanio platform for Windows on Arm PCs includes not only the “piece of technology” applied to high-end Dimensity SoCs for smartphones, but also 5G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even designed specifically for laptops. includes a de-designed display driver IC (DDIC). company announced.
the company’s latest Dimension 9200 (opens in new tab) The smartphone SoC features 8 general-purpose CPU cores and 11 cluster graphics processing units with hardware raytracing support. The CPU department includes 1 Arm Cortex-X3 performance-enhancing core running at 3.05 GHz, 3 Cortex-A715 high-performance cores at 2.85 GHz, and 4 Cortex-A510 energy-efficient cores. Also, the SoC is compatible with LPDDR5X-8533 memory.
In contrast, MediaTek’s top-of-the-line companion 1380 (opens in new tab) High-end Chromebook SoC features 4 standard high-performance Arm Cortex-A78 cores, 4 standard energy-efficient Arm Cortex-A55 cores, 5-cluster Arm Mali-A57 graphics, and LPDDR4X-2133 memory subsystem at 3.0 GHz I have it. Clearly, the Kompanio 1380 is less capable than the Dimensity 9200, so MediaTek naturally wants to beef up the PC SoC before it’s ready for Windows on Arm machines.
At this time, it’s unclear if MediaTek plans to use performance-enhanced Arm Cortex-X cores in its notebook SoCs, or develop its own custom Arm-compatible cores like Apple does. On the one hand, if MediaTek plans to compete with his Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon SoC, which uses Nuvia’s custom cores, it would be perfectly logical for MediaTek to develop custom high-performance cores. But on the other hand, this requires much more investment and effort than licensing a high-performance out-of-the-box core.
MediaTek is slowly evolving from a developer of mainstream SoCs for consumer electronics and handsets to a supplier of premium application processors for advanced smartphones. It would be logical for MediaTek to start developing its own performance-enhancing IP in-house in order to differentiate itself from its competitors (especially his Qualcomm, Samsung and Unisoc) and offer unique features, but the company is not doing so. I don’t know if they have any plans. now.
