It's MediaTek v Qualcomm in the motherboard of all battles

The two big boys of the mobile chip world, MediaTek and Qualcomm, are about to see their flagship products – the Helio X20 and Snapdragon 820 respectively – come to market, with details starting to emerge; and it's likely to be all about the numbers. MediTek has ten cores to Qualcomm’s eight, but Qualcomm has taken the canny …

[Swarthy]

Shades of the mid-90's

Only instead of Intel, AMD, and Cyrix; we have Qualcomm, MediaTek and Exynos.

I love it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shades of the mid-90's

Would that make nVidia Transmeta? Oddly obscure despite perhaps being the most interesting and compelling?

I wonder when we'll hear something substantial of Tegra P1/V1...

Weren't we supposed to expect 10nm FinFET ARM designs to appear in 2016? Ares?

...and what of AMD's 16nm "K12" ARM parts? I'm sure we were told to expect those in 2016 too?

I fancy this is all much more interesting than x86 ever was :D

[choleric]

Re: Shades of the mid-90's

> Would that make nVidia Transmeta? Oddly obscure despite perhaps being the most interesting and compelling?

I bet you won't see Linus Torvalds signing up to work for nVidia though.

[Frank Bough]

The battle for second place is hotting up

I can't decide which one to ignore first

[Anonymous Coward]

MediaTek - GPL Violators contemptuous of technical support

my experience of MediaTek is that they violate the GPL, and are a leech on the opensource community, taking the work of others and abusing it for their own gain.

I've had the misfortune of trying to build a linux driver for one of their chips, and the quality of the code is pretty awful, and they haven't bothered to keep it up to date so it only working with the now ancient 2.6 kernel!

I'll never knowingly buy anything with a mediatek chip in it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exynos theory (yes it may be tinfoil hat time)

I read on the reg recently about the court case against the TSMC exec who jumped ship to Samsung, leaking new nm processes and headhunting relevant engineering staff in the process. Comparison with IBM's same density chips showed lots of variance, while the Samsung process was almost identical to TSMC's. That exec will get some slap on the wrist while no doubt Samsung got a leg up. I'd wonder if the early jump forward in Exynos procs was in any way because of this? Funny what can change the fortunes of corporate competition, and as long as the cost is low compared to the benefit, it will continue to be a wild east in which to do business.