MediaTek's upcoming flagship SoC reportedly pushes its Cortex-A78 core to 3.2GHz

We have a fairly decent idea about how the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 fares thanks to a slew of leaks and Qualcomm's in-house test results. Even Samsung's Exynos 2100's performance is fairly well documented, albeit in an unofficial capacity. With no future Kirin chipsets on the horizon, HiSilicon is out of the picture for now. That leaves us with MediaTek. Reports from earlier this year told us that the Taiwanese chipmaker had a 6nm flagship SoC in the pipeline. We now know a little more about it thanks to a new leak.

Weibo stalwart Digital Chat Station has stumbled upon one MediaTek-branded SoC running ARM's newest Cortex-A78 cores. It isn't surprising, considering that there are two of them in the works. However, this particular 6nm chipset can reportedly push its Cortex-A78 core to a whopping 3.2GHz. However, there is more to a chipset's performance than just raw clock speed, and it'll be interesting to see how the mystery MediaTek silicon fares against Qualcomm and Samsung's offerings. If a Geekbench listing from earlier is anything to go by, it will be able to trade blows with last year's Qualcomm Snapdragon 865.

Digital Chat Station also uses the term 'super core', which indicates that MediaTek is to likely switch over to a 1+3+4 core configuration on its chipset. Even if it were to run a combination of Cortex-A78 and Cortex-A55 cores, it could get a lot done, as exhibited by the Exynos 1080 that featured similar specifications. It shouldn't be long before MediaTek unveils the chip officially, as the company plans on launching it by February 2021.