MediaTek wants to develop high-performance SoCs for PCs
At present, MediaTek has become one of the leading suppliers of Chromebook system chips, and many cheap Chromebook models use MediaTek chips, but MediaTek has bigger ambitions and hopes to enter the Windows On Arm ecosystem. To meet the performance expectations of Windows users, MediaTek plans to develop SoCs with stronger CPU and GPU performance.
According to PC World, Vince Hu, vice president of MediaTek, said at a company event that MediaTek will make larger investments in CPUs and GPUs to meet the performance needs of PCs. MediaTek’s Kompanio platform for the Windows On Arm ecosystem will include some of its technology used in high-end smartphones, as well as 5G, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi technologies, and even a display driver IC (DDIC) designed specifically for laptops.
At present, MediaTek’s latest SoC for smartphones is Dimensity 9200, and the CPU part is a triple-cluster architecture of 1+3+4, including one large core (Cortex-X3@3.05 GHz), three large cores (Cortex-A715@2.85 GHz), and four small cores (Cortex-A510@1.8GHz), built-in 8MB CPU L3 cache and 6MB system cache; the GPU is Immortalis-G715 MC11, which supports hardware ray tracing of Vulkan 1.3; supports 8533 MT/s LPDDR5X memory and 8-channel UFS4.0 flash memory.
MediaTek also released the Kompanio 1380 this year for high-end Chromebooks. The CPU part consists of four Cortex-A78@3.0 GHz cores focusing on performance, and four Cortex-A55@2.0 GHz cores focusing on energy efficiency; the GPU part is Arm-Mali G57; supports four-channel LPDDR4X-2133 memory. However, in fact, the performance of Kompanio 1380 is not as good as that of Dimensity 9200. If you want SoC to enter the Windows On Arm ecosystem, MediaTek must first improve its performance.
It is unclear whether MediaTek’s SoC for the Windows On Arm ecosystem will continue to use the Cortex-X core, or develop a custom Arm architecture-compatible core. Qualcomm, which has the same goal, is using the Nuvia team’s technology to create a custom core, but this requires a larger investment, and it will take much more time and effort.
