Talk from Mobile World Congress last week in Barcelona is that AMD and MediaTek have teamed up to work on mobile SoC graphics. Ultra low-power AMD graphics in a MediaTek SoC would presumably give them a hefty advantage over the other high-end SoCs out there just licensing ARM Mali or Imagination PowerVR tech and could better deliver Qualcomm Adreno -- which in turn are far-derived by AMD/ATI via Qualcomm's Imageon acquisition over a half-decade ago -- and NVIDIA Tegra class graphics.
Not bad but MediaTek needs to get major design wins with higher end headsets. While it has come a long way from having 1% market share 4-5 years ago, it's hardly well known in the developed countries. While MediaTek's CPU performance is good on paper, the phones which tend to use these CPUs tend to be from Chinese brands and/or don't have good polished OSs. I suppose it's a good start to target the low-end and mid-range sectors because that's where the Chinese headset makers are taking market share from Samsung, etc.
http://iblog.at/cardvdgps/2014/12/12/soc-market-share-in-3rd-quarter-of-2014/
Not bad but MediaTek needs to get major design wins with higher end headsets. While it has come a long way from having 1% market share 4-5 years ago, it's hardly well known in the developed countries. While MediaTek's CPU performance is good on paper, the phones which tend to use these CPUs tend to be from Chinese brands and/or don't have good polished OSs. I suppose it's a good start to target the low-end and mid-range sectors because that's where the Chinese headset makers are taking market share from Samsung, etc.
http://iblog.at/cardvdgps/2014/12/12/soc-market-share-in-3rd-quarter-of-2014/
Trends are pointing to mediatek outperforming Qualcomm on low and mid end phones...recently Sony switched to them.
Nothing wrong with mediatek or chinese phones. The cpu's aren't the fastest but they work well enough in the mid range market and chinese phones just use android like everyone else so have basically the same ui. Just got a THL 5000 for son for very little money - looks and performs like a phone twice the price and the battery is huge so needs charging half as often.
It's a step in the door for AMD, but I can't see them making much money - mtk cpu's are very cheap and there's plenty of gpu competition. AMD will practically have to give the license away to make it worth switching from ARM gpu's mtk are currently using which are hardly going to have been expensive.
Mediatek has only ever made lower-end SoCs afaik. Kinda hard to get big design wins when you only put out middling products. They seem to be stepping it up with A57 and A72 licenses though.
Nothing wrong with mediatek or chinese phones. The cpu's aren't the fastest but they work well enough in the mid range market and chinese phones just use android like everyone else so have basically the same ui. Just got a THL 5000 for son for very little money - looks and performs like a phone twice the price and the battery is huge so needs charging half as often.
who needs mediatek when you have A7 and A53
Not bad but MediaTek needs to get major design wins with higher end headsets. While it has come a long way from having 1% market share 4-5 years ago, it's hardly well known in the developed countries.
AMD failed in that market once...but basically this would be an easy way for AMD to try and sneak back into that market(somewhat)...at the side of a company that already has a very decent market share (that is well above Nvidias').
If the chip is only half decent...then this is a win win for AMD, Mediatek AND Customers.
Of course the design has to be good enough..but in this scenario the tech isn't held back by the terrible lack of AMDs funds...so I don't see why it couldn't work...because their GPU/APU designs are very solid...they just lacked the funds/partnership to create and distribute them with an acceptable node/platform and advance as fast as Intel on the fab side (well..duh..Intel also has its' own fab...but then again...Mediatek could come to the rescue here..depending on where the final product will be made)
How do you propose it gets major wins in high-end devices without a competent GPU?
All the SoC makers can license Arm CPU cores but it diverges with what GPU they use. PowerVR & Adreno are the clear leaders in this field (with NV playing its small part). Samsung has to go with generic Arm GPU (Mali) tech for a long time, which is why they just fail to compete against Qualcomm & Apple SOCs on graphics.
In their latest S6, they require a node advantage just to match 20nm Snapdragons or Apple SoCs.
MediaTek is doing what Samsung should have done a long time ago. Get a proper graphics tech into their SOC.
their desktop GPU's don't scale down well enough