With every major tablet manufacturer planning or releasing new tablet lines, it seems only natural to expect Amazon to soon update its popular Kindle tablets. But one big question concerns who Amazon will choose as its system-on-chip provider. Although earlier speculation revolved around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800, there are rumors that Amazon might banking on MediaTek‘s MT8135 instead.
A leak was made last month that talked about the specs for Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HD tablets, both for the 7-inch and 8.9-inch models. Common to both version is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, which is said to be running at 2 GHz on the new Kindle Fires even though it is capable of 2.3 GHz clock speeds. The Snapdragon 800 would seem logical as it is the CPU of choice with today’s generation of smartphones.
However, MediaTek is not ready to bow out of the fight yet. Known for its affordable chips, MediaTek last month announced a double whammy: The “True Octa-Core” SoC and the MT8135, the first big.LITTLE ARM chip to use heterogeneous multi-processing. It is now rumored that MediaTek has landed orders for the MT8135 to power the next generation of Kindle Fire HDs. MediaTek refused to verify but said it is interested in any potential client.
With Texas Instruments, Amazon’s former chip provider, out of the equation, it seems like it will be a tough fight between Qualcomm and MediaTek. On the one hand, the MT8135 does sound enticing on paper. But on the other hand, the Snapdragon 800 is already being used in the real world today and MediaTek has yet to prove how much better its MT8135 really is.
VIA: DIGITIMES
