MediaTek unveiled some high-performance chipsets for smartphones last year and, now, the company is eying upon the growing wearables market. At the CES 2015, MediaTek has announced its MT2601 SoC crafted for wearable devices, which is based on the Google’s Android Wear platform.
The MT2601 is powered with a 1.2GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU paired with an ARM Mali-400 MP GPU. The chip can also be connected up to the usual range of wireless modems and external sensors, for instance, MediaTek’s in-house MT6630 five-in-one wireless SoC with qHD display resolution support. The chip easily fits in a PCBA footprint measuring less than 480 square millimeters and is built with 41.5 percent lesser components in comparison to other competing chips, and also helping in keeping the PCB sizes and costs compact.
However, the latest chip by MediaTek doesn’t really render as much power as the quad-core Cortex-A7 powered Qualcomm Snapdragon 400, which has been used in the Samsung Gear Live, LG G Watch R and Asus ZenWatch smartwatches. Although, MediaTek’s latest offering might perform better in fitness and location tracking oriented devices.
J.C. Hsu, General Manager, MediaTek said,"The MT2601 has an incredibly small die size and is highly optimized for cost and power performance. The platform solution, comprises of MT2601 integrated with Android Wear software, will fuel the maker revolution and empower the application developer community.”he said.
The MT2601 is a low power processor with smaller die size and limited features. The chip easily fits the bill for economical, low power and better battery requirement of wearable gadgets. MediaTek also states that it will continue to evolve the MT2601 in order to align it with the Android Wear. In the future, we can expect to see an extended wearable SoC line-up from MediaTek.
The MT2601 is already under mass production and also ready for deployment in the upcoming Android Wear products.
