MediaTek’s eight-cores-at-once SoC shows up in first Android

        The smartphone core race may finally be coming to an end. 2013 brought us plenty of new SoC designs, but quad-core still reigns supreme. Still, the allure of octa-core chips has been too much for some manufacturers to resist, as we saw with Samsung and its Exynos 5 Octa. Still, should that really count, without all eight cores pumping away at once? Not content to leave that question hanging, some firms have endeavored to deliver proper full eight-cores-at-once SoC. We know Samsung’s working on something along those lines, and software updates might even bring that mode to existing Exynos 5 Octa chips. MediaTek’s been developing an eight-core chip of its own, and today we hear about the first handset to feature it, the UMI X2S.

        The what X2S? Yeah, we know: UMI is a Chinese brand that’s pretty unknown to Western audiences, and you probably shouldn’t count on seeing this handset pop up in a store near you anytime soon, but using MediaTek’s octa-core MT6592 SoC still makes it noteworthy.

        The X2S runs that MT6592 at 1.5GHz, has a five-inch 1080p display, 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel camera, and 32GB flash storage – not too shabby, all considering. Even with this brand new chip, the phone should still be pretty affordable, selling for what works out to $245, with higher-end options (more flash, we assume) going for more like $330.