The mobile chipset market is largely dominated by Qualcomm, which enjoys the bulk of the market when it comes to high-end SoCs in particular. It has more competition in the mid-range and lower end of the market, however, which is where MediaTek has been able to carve out a place as the world’s fourth largest fabless semiconductor company. It was only with the recent launch of the Dimensity series that MediaTek’s ambitions to get a slice of the high-end SoC market became apparent.
A purported Geekbench 5 score for the forthcoming MediaTek MT6893 has surfaced and it shows the 6 nm chipset trading blows with the vaunted Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. Where Snapdragon 865 picks up a Geekbench 5 single-core score of 886 and a multi-core score of 3104, the new MT6893 scores 886 and 2948 respectively. If accurate, the result will certainly make Qualcomm sit up and take notice, even if it is about to launch the faster Snapdragon 875.
Interestingly, a Weibo-sourced leak suggests that the MT6893 is running Arm’s latest Cortex-A78 architecture for the high-performance cores with one clocked at 3.0 GHz and three clocked at 2.6 GHz. The S865 uses Arm’s older Cortex-A77 architecture, so theoretically, the MT6893 should be faster than the numbers it has posted. Either the source is incorrect, and it is running Cortex-A77 cores or its 6 nm node isn’t as advanced. Alternatively, its drivers may yet to be fully optimized.
Regardless, MediaTek is making it harder for people to dismiss as has been the case in the past. It doesn’t look like it will be long before people are talking about MediaTek in the same breath as they do Qualcomm.