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
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.