Chip maker MediaTek already offers a range of solutions for smartphones, tablets, and… other devices. There are also a handful of Chromebooks powered by MediaTek’s MT8173 quad-core processor.
Now it looks like there’s a new MT8183 octa-core chip that could be used in upcoming Chromebooks, among other products.
The folks at xda-developers noticed some code commits related to the unannounced processor in the Linux Kernel and Chromium Gerrit.
While there aren’t a lot of details yet, it looks like the new MT8183 will feature four ARM Cortex-A72 high-perfomance CPU cores and four energy-efficient Cortex-A53 cores.
The older MT8173, by comparison, has two A72 CPU cores and two A53 cores.
Doubling the CPU core count probably won’t double the performance, but it should give at least a small boost to devices featuring the new processor.
There’s no word on the GPU or other specs for the new chip yet, and no information about which device makers might launch Chromebooks powered by the MT8183.
Acer, Lenovo, and Poin2 currently sell one or more Chromebooks with MT8173 chips.
I’d love an octa core Chromebook with 32gb of storage, 4gb of RAM, at least 10 hours of battery life and a screen between 12.1 and 13.4 inches. When can I buy one?
Actually the MT8173 is way old and on 28nm with the big cores at 2GHz and an update would likely be on 12nm- the fact that they can double the core count at same TDP means a more advanced node so 16nm (12nm is a version of TSMC ‘s 16nm)
You can expect higher clocks too so 2.4GHz or more and doubling the cores more than doubles perf.
On the efficiency side there would be a massive gain too.
Looks good but it would be nice to know if this chip will be at least as open as the RK3399 (meaning documentation and mainstream kernel support).
Otherwise, the 2 extra Cortex-A72 cores are not enough to steer enthusiasts and board makers away from the Rockchip.
I really like this… software to transfer threads from big to little cores should be simple as both clusters have 4 cores. Seabios presently only works on Intel chipsets, so I will have to pass until that changes.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chrome_OS_devices/Chromebook
Taiwan needs a non-profit raspberry pi clone that uses Mediatek chips.