Qualcomm and Apple own America, or at least the mobile phone chipset market. While there are plenty of other players out there - Mediatek, Rockchip, Samsung, Nvidia, ST-Ericsson, and Intel come to mind - nobody has yet posed a serious challenge to the dominance of Qualcomm and Apple in Americans' smartphones.
Taiwanese chipset maker Mediatek is trying, though, and the company is hoping its new octa-core MT6795 chip will do the trick by bringing "2K" displays like you see on the LG G3, to more devices. Mediatek has had some success here in low-end smartphones such as the Alcatel Fierce for T-Mobile and the unlocked Blu line, but the MT6795 aims to push that success further up the product ladder.
The MT6795 uses eight ARM Cortex-A53, 64-bit cores clocked at up to 2.2GHz each. It has LTE onboard. Special features include support for 480 frame-per-second, 120Hz display support, 1080p slow-motion capture and playback, and 2,560-by-1,440 displays. Mediatek's Mohit Bhushan says that Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810, with its 4K display support, is just "overdesigned for smartphones."
"We have two separate roadmaps, a smartphone roadmap and a tablet roadmap," Bhushan said. "A57 processors and 4K display support translate into cost and power, and that doesn't bode well in the smartphone space." In other words, he suggests Mediatek's chips will be cheaper and last longer than competing Qualcomm processors.
The real barriers to the U.S. market are the carriers, it seems. Bhushan said Mediatek is working on getting its chipsets certified by U.S. carriers, and it helps that the company is working on one with integrated CDMA. It'll be targeting not only T-Mobile, but AT&T and Verizon, Bhushan said. (When I asked about Sprint, he was more circumspect.)
"Understanding carrier needs, doing the testing with them, that takes time," Bhushan said. "Starting the middle of next year is when we'll become more relevant in the U.S."
The new chipset also supports carrier aggregation on the full set of bands that AT&T has specced out for next year.
So what does this mean for U.S. consumers? Once Mediatek's chipsets are cleared by the carriers, it may mean cheaper phones with super-high-res, 2,560-by-1,440 displays like the LG G3 has. They could come from LG, Sony, Alcatel, Lenovo, ZTE, or Huawei, all Mediatek clients. I'd personally expect to see them first from Huawei and ZTE in the U.S.