MediaTek to Announce World's First 12-Core Processor Built on a 7nm Process for Mobile Devices

MediaTek is one of the biggest producers of mobile chips in China and is a major rival of Qualcomm. MediaTek is was the first company to announce a 10-core chip last year and as per the reports, it will also unveil its 12-core processor next year based on the 7nm manufacturing process.

MediaTek is the name synonymous with the company that produces mid-range chips. The company has seen tremendous growth over the past few years since their products are similar in performance to those manufactured by Qualcomm. MediaTek produces low-cost processors and chipsets that power devices targeted at mid-range consumers.

As per the new reports, MediaTek might jump the bandwagon and produce the world's first 12-core chip for use in mobile devices and ultraportable gadgets such as tablets and Chromebooks. The new mobile processors will be made using a 7nm manufacturing process, reported GSMArena. MediaTek and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) are said to join hands to manufacture the new chips.

The next-generation SOC from MediaTek will be very powerful and might give Qualcomm Snapdragon processors a run for their money. Since the chip is fabricated using a new manufacturing process and lithography at 7nm, it is expected to be very power-efficient, even more than Snapdragon 835.

The 7nm chips are on their schedule for Q1 2018 and both TSMC and Samsung will manufacture these chips. Therefore, we might see the 12-core MediaTek chip in the market by Q2 2018 and other companies will follow soon. This also concludes that the next generation Samsung flagship might feature a 7nm chip, particularly the Galaxy S9, reported PhoneArena.

The benefits of a multi-core chip featuring more than 4-cores are still debatable. As most of the applications are still not optimised for a high core count. It can be evident from the current-generation flagship Snapdragon chips which are quad-core and have an optimised architecture which helps them to perform better than the octa-core CPUs.