MediaTek now counts Amazon as a customer

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 8 Aug 2013

A long time ago, MediaTek used to be a dirty word. The company was known for making chips that were shoved inside devices that were clones of smartphones sold in the West. Today, that negative image is gone, and while MediaTek doesn’t power high-end phones on store shelves in countries like the UK or Germany, you can find MediaTek chips in devices from LG, Acer, and even Sony.

With all that in mind, let’s focus on a report coming out of DigiTimes that says MediaTek has won orders for their MT8135 chip from none other than Amazon. The MT8135 has two ARM Cortex A15 cores and two ARM Cortex A7 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. Unlike previously seen big.LITTLE configurations, as seen in chips like the Exynos 5 Octa, the MT8135 can have all four cores operating at the same time.

So when will we see the first Kindle to rock a MediaTek chip? Next year. So while yes, this news is a bit early, it should force companies like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and even Intel to start questioning their prices.