Just yesterday Samsung announced their new Exynos chipsets, one of which was the Exynos 5260 which unlike the 5422, is a hexa-core chipset. What this means is that instead of four cores or eight cores, it will pack six cores, which at the moment is a pretty rare configuration as far as smartphones are concerned.
As it stands the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Neo is the only device to feature a hexa-core setup. That being said, it seems that MediaTek will be interested in releasing a hexa-core chipset of their own, thanks to a recent product roadmap that was posted onto Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter).
The chipset will sport the model number MT6591 and can be clocked at speeds of up to 1.5GHz. Based on its roadmap, we can look forward to the chipset being launched in Q1 of 2014 where it is expected to make its way onto mid-ranged devices. Unfortunately additional details were not revealed, so we can’t be sure if this will rely on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, or if it will be a “true” hexa-core chipset.
For those unfamiliar, MediaTek has a “true” octa-core chipset where all 8 cores are used. This is compared to Samsung’s octa-core chipset which uses the big.LITTLE architecture where there are 8 cores, but only four are used at a time.
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