By Herman Lai, posted Nov 2, 2012 at 3:09 AM, 1,854 views,

MediaTek Making 8-Core Chips For Chinese Smartphone, With 4G LTE Support

Affordable quad-core smartphones are everywhere in China. The cheapest one is just around $160 USD, which is the ZTE U950 that we reported few days ago. Taiwanese chipset maker MediaTek is reportedly to bring 8-core mobile processor MTK6599 to the Chinese market, which is likely to support 4G LTE, TD-SCDMA and WCDMA network. ZTE is rumored to be the first smartphone maker to equip MediaTek 8-core processor, and it might land in China as soon as next year.

Typically, cores are used to divide a complicated task across several graphics processing units (GPUs) or central processing units (CPUs). So, rendering a video is likely to be faster on a quad-core device instead of on a dual-core device because the task can be split across four cores instead of just two. With an 8-core processor, it would work in the same way, which splitting tasks across 8 different cores. While you’re still thinking MediaTek’s 8-core processor is so dreamy, Intel has actually began to work on a 48-core processor, but it will take five to 10 years until it hits the market. All these things just sound a bit crazy right now.

Source: MTKSJ (Chinese Translated)