14 DAY TRIAL // While NVIDIA, Samsung and Qualcomm might have the most famous tablet processor platforms, that doesn't mean there aren't others just as widespread, or more so. MediaTek is about to prove this.
Samsung and Qualcomm are pretty good at spreading their ARM-based platforms across a wide range of performance scales.
NVIDIA isn't that good, but it's been getting better, launching Tegra and Tegra i-series SoCs (system-on-chip devices), the former for high-end, large tablets and the latter for weaker ones, maybe even phones.
Still, MediaTek will rather leave that “product range” in the dust because its next batch of SoCs, or application processors, will include six or eight models.
All of them will have multiple cores, more of them as the customer base rises. That's why there will be quad-core chips, six-core chips and even 8-core processors.
Those last ones will be particularly mind boggling because they'll compete with notebooks in terms of performance. Maybe we'll even see ARM-powered laptops actually.
The quad-core processors might end up integrated into phone core-logic sets, as part of wireless chips even.
The six-core units will be somewhere in between, powering tablets like the ones currently up for sale around the world, in 8-inch to 11.6-inch sizes. No specifications have been published, unfortunately.
MedaTek hopes to double its tablet CPU shipments in 2014, and this intended lineup of chips, or application processors or SoCs or whatever you want to call them. Since the shipments in 2013 are expected to be of over 20 million, that's quite an ambition.
So, that means that MediaTek could power 40 million tablets in 2014. Seeing as how total tablet shipments are expected at 180-200 million, that leads to a pretty high percentage. Then again, many of the chips could be used in phones instead, so we can't really make any real estimate here.