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Helio X30 - Interview with Mediatek at MWC 2017

2017-03-02
as a - gary sims from andrew authority we're here at Mobile World Congress 2017 with rust from mediatek rust great pleasure to meet you sir pleasure to meet you as well tell me quickly who you are immediateiy what's your role Rasmus Ketchikan mediatek corporate sales international I take care of the Latin America and North America markets for MediaTek excellent excellent this is going to be a great show I think for mediatek there's a lot of great stuff going on this year at MWC and we were talking earlier about media tech and the competition we won't mention them by name but there are are four maybe major chip suppliers for mobile phones and I was saying what position is media taking that you said by sales that they're actually in quite a good position you want to tell me a bit about that sure so if we talk about unit sales right the actual phones that are sold in the world in 2016 that were powered by MediaTek there were over half a million half a billion I should say and very difficult to say half a billion that's not a mistake so if you if you estimate the global market to be somewhere between one and a half to two billion phones per year it's probably closer to one and a half depends which analyst report you read it's a third of the worldwide market so I would say if you started to rank by volume we'd be probably number two well that's that's great now that number two in a particular market which we would maybe call the mid to low range mean yesterday I saw some new Alcatel phones very budget and they all had media tech processes in them so that's definitely a niche that you've you've dominated really right so yes a media tech has started originally from sort of the mid-range products but in the last couple of years we've certainly made great strides in moving towards the mid-to-upper market in 2000 year to two years ago in 2015 now we launched our brand Helio which was for our premium line of products and that kind of sort of kicked off our whole strategy of developing into what we call super mid or basically the second third time buying customers who buy their second third handsets and really demand now higher performance higher quality right so we are now announcing this year the latest generation of our Helio product x13 which were very excited about it's a new 10 nanometer decker core product and frankly if you start looking at some of the customers perhaps maybe not in Europe and United States but in emerging markets you started to see some fairly sophisticated fairly high-end handsets very very nice products with our Helio with our helo chipsets which are I would say among the flagships in that per click portfolio and again you know if you look at the top 5 handset makers in the world today three of them come now from China right so yeah that market certainly can't be ignored that category of vendors cannot be ignored and we are very well positioned in that segment so let's talk about the X 30 that you've announced that now here at Mobile World Congress that's a 10 core --decor core 10 nanometer fabrication process which is the bleeding edge in terms of fabrication also with the are Mali GPU inside of it so on paper that's that's a good set of you know good specifications right so it's 10 10 right so it's it's a it's 10 nanometer and it's Decker core it's our second generation of Decker core I think one important thing to really understand is that it is not a race to the number of cores ok yeah so it's not like 10 cores today 12 cores next year and then 16 24 4 is that's really not it yeah and it deserves to be explained and and you know it's it's almost sometimes immediately they kind of almost kind of make a cartoon out of it you know it's a race - how many cores you can add we've seen this with maybe ten years ago and some some kind of shady handset makers who went from mp3 to mp4 to mp5 m26 mp7 is not what we're doing clearly the demands from the consumer today it's kind of going into - ironically opposite directions one is extreme performance there is a race for performance yeah every year we want more we feel we deserve more we need more virtual reality augmented reality this are all you know used to be supercomputer yeah type of applications right so that's one direction extreme performance the second one is extreme power mission efficiency right those two things are the running really opposite always enemies of each others right so how do you deal with that right how do you balance one on the other and the way we do it is essentially by what's called you know complicated terms is is the what we're trying to do here is we do debt we provide dedicated hardware for both the extreme performance yeah high-end course right that drive the highly demanding power-hungry applications typically in a very short amount of time the duration of those applications is very limited whereas when you don't demand top performance you offered your your workload your your CPU load onto the very power efficient course so if you provide a high-end core in the low-end course the only remaining part is how you manage it right and the analogy you know we've used with in the past was you know with cars but when the first cars came up they they didn't have a year shift bucks right it was a single you know single gear right and that's all that was required once the engines became more sophisticated than the speed increase rate you needed to to manage your engine much better so switching between higher end performance cores and the lower end performance core is what we call core pilot is sensual gearbox yet difference is that you know it's an automatic gearbox yeah right so there is no operator doing it and and that operation because you have now 10 cores similar to maybe new Mercedes who has nine gears right you have to be pretty good and pretty smart about switching between that's one Corp I look at and then that's we're in the fourth generation of our core pilot we've invested tons and the algorithms this is what used to be called in the 70s and continues to be called parallel computing yeah and anybody who studied computer architecture in school knows how not not trivial that it's not trivial at all so just let me clarify that for some of our viewers most OEM chip om to have eight cause there are two clusters two gears today in your analogy but the Decker core one for me you've got the three gears so you've got the two cores at the highest end writing for in the middle and then for lower so you really got the right gear for the right workload isn't it and that's what the co-pilot absolute out right in fact the first generation of the octa-core is used to be all identical cores ATSs right then the second generation is so-called big little yeah right and now we have three clusters we have the extreme performance let's say that's a nu a 73 yeah we have the a 53 in the middle yeah which is what we had in the previous generation yeah I know we added 835 and which are extremely powerful situations that's right so overall if you look in the real world applications we managed to improve the power consumption by 50% while increasing the performance by 35% so that's kind of the the golden regev grail right absolutely you're going in two opposite directions at the same time and the great thing is I mean looking about range the a35 is literally the most power efficient 64-bit core I'll make the 53 it becomes a stable of all those over in the reserve 73 is the highest performance hearing we've got you've got all three covered in areas and your interconnect in your scheduling is handling the switches between those between power and performance which is which is a great value proposition anymore now the way you put it it sounds pretty everyone's talking about 5g I don't know whether you have a message about five year I'm skeptical still because there is no 5g standard but everyone's talking about it I think they're out of the gate too early I think people have got maybe they messages confused because they're not really trying to show people what 5g will truly bring us at the end mediatek have got anything to say on that at the moment or so we're making some announcements today right on our partnerships and development 5g we're going to work with Nokia which is the equipment manufacturer leader because the standards are still kind of up in flux right it's important to work with the leaders example last year we talked about our collaboration with DoCoMo this year we're talking about collaboration with Nokia this is the right type of partners for the kind of develop yeah so we clearly have our ear to the ground we are working on it it's a tremendous amount of work you know 4G was a huge amount of work so it's 5g probably on steroids in terms of how soon how quickly you know I don't have a crystal ball the the demand for the bandwidth obviously is not going anywhere yeah US US carriers finally finally starting to talk about unlimited cetera Penance right so kind of that the the birds out of the cat cave yeah once people start to and frankly I've seen this in China a couple years ago when people started to stream videos and watch it on the trains and all it haven't really happened in the u.s. most of it still is occurring over Wi-Fi once people get a hand of it and it's very hard to go that it is yeah so the thirst for the data is just going to ramp up yeah now some say that there's plenty of them within 4G and 5 G's probably more about IOT and more about distributed computing yeah things like that that's probably true so it might take a little bit of time but the excitement is there there probably some they're probably some industry of scales to be explored you know when the IOT starting to take off one becomes a much more mainstream I think I think that's going to drive the investment into 5g and we'll be there you'll be there great well my name is Gary Sims from Android authorities and pleasure talking to rust from media tech stay tuned Xander authority will bring you more news and announcements from Mobile World Congress 2017 thank you my pleasure
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