Reports from China claim that Mediatek is working on a processor with ten (deca) or twelve (dodeca) cores, neatly bypassing the 64-bit octa-core processors that are being released today.
According to GizChina, the new chipset is code-named ‘Bomb’ and will use an ARM architecture.
Comment
Adding more cores introduces issues, such as higher battery consumption if they are all being used. Additionally, there will always be a delay between such devices being developed and seeing use, as software needs to be written to take advantage of the extra resources.
Adding to the argument in favour of a lower core count, today’s high-end smartphones (commonly fitted with quad- and octa-core processors) are not often required to use all of the processing power available to them – the main reason that most octa-core devices use a Big.Little configuration, which offloads low-power tasks onto smaller cores. Progress is good, but this sounds like a marketing ploy more than a necessary development at this point. (TA)
