Mediatek jumped to third place among mobile SoC vendors in the third quarter, and it has vowed to ship chips with 64-bit cores and LTE in 2014 as it makes a bid for markets beyond its stronghold in Asia.
Qualcomm rose to second place (behind Apple) in SoCs for tablets in the quarter in what one market watcher called a "dramatic turn."
The global smartphone applications processor market grew 31% from a year earlier to $4.9 billion, according to a Strategy Analytics report (subscription required).
Qualcomm, Apple, Mediatek, Samsung, and Spreadtrum were the top five revenue earners, capturing 80% of the smartphone SoC market in the quarter. Qualcomm continued to dominate the sector with a 53% revenue share. Mediatek took third place with 10%.
Mohit Bhushan, Mediatek's vice president and general manager of US corporate marketing, told us the company will integrate LTE into its SoCs in 2014. It also will roll out SoCs with 64-ARM cores using ARM's big.little architecture, targeting tablet and handsets. The integration will make Mediatek's chips "very mainstream and ready for the US [and] the European market" as the company aims at higher-end devices.
Finbarr Moynihan, Mediatek's general manager of international sales and marketing, said at a press conference: "Mediatek has been very strong in China, southeast Asia, and doing better in Europe... but our marketshare in the US is still quite small. I think there's opportunity to ship more products, to have our customers ship more products. LTE is a key part of that."
Moynihan predicted that Mediatek will ship more than 200 million SoCs for smartphones by the end of the year. In 2014, it will continue to push its MT6592 octa-core processor internationally, though it will be in phones in Asian markets by yearend.
Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processor hasn't attained the same success as its previous version. Strategy Analytics said the LTE-integrated chip "can enable Samsung to go after the high-volume mid-range market in 2014 and thus regain some volume share." | 