One of the key challenges faced by the semiconductor industry today is balancing the growing, yet conflicting demand for mobile devices featuring both high performance and long battery life. Last week MediaTek announced the MediaTek MT8135 application processor SoC that uses ARM® big.LITTLE™ technology to take a significant step forward in bringing energy efficient, high performance processing to the mainstream market.
MediaTek is among the first SoC designers to have adopted the ground-breaking big.LITTLE processing technology which is designed to address the energy and thermal issues associated with multicore system-on-chip (SoC) solutions. ARM big.LITTLE technology enables the creation of dual-cluster SoCs, with one high-performance (big) cluster for processing intensive tasks and a highly energy-efficient (LITTLE) cluster for executing routine functions.
There are three software models that can be used for big.LITTLE processing - cluster migration, CPU migration and the Heterogeneous Multi-Processing model which enables all the individual cores to be activated as and when needed, resulting in maximum efficiency. In order to take advantage of the energy and thermal efficiency rates we adopted the Multi-Processing software model, with software modifications we made to optimize the processing capability.
However, use of the most flexible and efficient software model isn't the only advantage of the MT8135. The real world SoC performance is highly dependent on the quality of the integrated heterogeneous scheduler. Our advanced scheduler delivers optimum performance by balancing workload intelligently and efficiently.
We are very pleased to be the first company to enable heterogeneous-scheduler-supported Multi-Processing on a mobile SoC in the form of the MT8135 Reference Design, and are uniquely positioned to support the next generation of mobile device design, such as tablets and smartphones, bringing premium specifications to the mainstream.
More detail on the MT8135 can be found in our position paper here, and we look forward to continuing to work with ARM in developing leading solutions for the mobile market.
Partner blogger: T.Y. Lin serves as Director of Computing Platform Division at the Cooperate Technology Office, MediaTek. Mr. Lin began his career with MediaTek in 1999. Since then he has held a series of senior positions in MediaTek, responsible for product development as well as planning of various cutting-edge SoC solutions.