Mediatek MT6592 vs Mediatek MT6589 vs Mediatek MT8321

Mediatek MT6592

The MediaTek MT6592 is a mid-range 28 nm SoC for Android smartphones and tablets. It was announced near the end of 2013 and is manufactured in 28 nm. It includes 8 Cortex-A7 processor cores that are typically clocked up to 1.7 - 2.0 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates an ARM Mali-450 GPU at 700 MHz, WLAN, a video decoder for up to 4K content, a LPDDR3 memory controller at 666 MHz, and a 2G/3G (UMTS/HSPA+) radio.

Although the MT6592 offers eight relatively high clocked CPU cores compared to other SoCs, its performance in day-to-day usage is a bit lower, as the Cortex-A7 cores offer slower performance per clock and only a few apps are able to make use of all 8 cores simultaneously. Modern dual-core (e.g., Apple A7) or quad-core (e.g., Cortex A15 or Snapdragon 800) SoCs can be clearly faster in everyday scenarios.

The integrated ARM Mali-450 MP4 GPU offers 4 graphics clusters that are clocked at a high 700 MHz. However, the performance of the GPU is somewhat below that of a Tegra 4 or Adreno 320. Also like the Nvidia rival, the Mali-450 lacks support for OpenGL ES 3.0.

Mediatek MT6589

The MediaTek MT6589 (previously known as the TMK6588) is an SoC for budget Android tablets and smartphones. It is manufactured in 28 nm and offers a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, a PowerVR SGX 544 GPU, 1080p30 video encoding and decoding, 802.11n WLAN, Bluetooth 4.0 and radios for Dual-SIM UMTS HSPA+, GPS and FM. The performance is similar to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 Series and adequate for everyday tasks like browsing.

Mediatek MT8321

The Mediatek MT8321 is a low-cost ARM SoC (System on a Chip) mainly used in smartphones. It is most likely manufactured in 28 nm and integrates a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor and a ARM Mali-400 MP2. The CPU cores are clocked at up to 1.3 GHz while the GPU is clocked at up to 500 MHz. Furthermore, the chip includes a EDGE / HSPA+ / WDCDMA radio and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi. The integrated single channel memory controller supports LPDDR3 RAM.

Performance

Since the Cortex-A7 architecture is somewhat slower than a Krait or Cortex-A9 design at the same clock speeds, the performance of the MT8121 is just below Nvidia's Tegra 3 or the Samsung Exynos 4412. The PowerVR SGX 544 is also just a low-cost solution not designed for ultra-high resolution displays or very demanding games.