Sunday, February 17, 2013

MediaTek's MT6589 quad-core CPU benchmarked: It's fast (for a budget chip)

Chip maker Mediatek might not be a big name in the US, but the company's low power ARM-based processors are showing up in a growing number of phones and tablets in China, India, and other nations. The latest Mediatek is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor, and while it's not quite in the same class as the chips powering the Google Nexus 4 or Nexus 10, it appears to be a pretty speedy chip that's almost as fast as the best processors from early 2012.

The folks at thinkdigit have been testing one of the first phones to feature a Mediatek MT6589 processor, and they've shared benchmarks suggesting that the phone is almost as powerful as a Samsung Galaxy S III, and much faster than most phones in the same price-range.

thinkdigit Micromax Canvas HD A116 benchmark

thinkdigit.com

The Micromax Canvas HD A116 features Mediatek's quad-core processor, a 5 inch, 72op display, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, and dual SIM card slots. It runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and the phone is available in India for about $277.

According to benchmarks from thinkdigit, the phone gets an Antutu score of about 13148 and a GLBenchmark Egypt score of 4866. While it's hardly the fastest phone around, it's a relatively inexpensive option that's speedy enough to handle almost any Android game or app you can throw at it.

Unfortunately thindigit also reports that their demo unit also rebooted unexpectedly a few times, but it's not clear if that's a widespread problem.

While the Micromax Canvas HD A116 is only available in India at the moment, we should start seeing other devices with Mediatek's quad-core MT6589 chip soon. There's a rumor that Archos plans to bring a 4.8 inch smartphone to market featuring the processor. And Chinese retail marketplace AliExpress has listings for several phones powered by MT6589 chips, with prices running from about $250 to about $450.

MediaTek's MT6589 quad-core CPU benchmarked: It's fast (for a budget chip) is a post from: Liliputing