The initial announcement of Mediatek’s new eight core MT6592 chip didn’t seem to spark up much interest. After all, it’s designed, in typical Mediatek fashion, to be an efficient, low power, and low cost chip. But perhaps an Antutu score beating out Qualcomm’s top of the line Snapdragon 800 is enough to make people pay attention.

The MT6592 scored a mighty 29600 when clocked at 1.7 Ghz, according to MyDrivers.com, which is a fair bit faster than anything currently on the market at the moment. This impressive score matches up with the initial performance expectations reported when we first head about MediaTek’s new MT6592, and puts it directly up against Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 800, which scores in the similar 30000 range in Antutu.

But is it really possible that a Cortex A7 chip can take on the newer Krait 400 and Cortex A15 based processors from Qualcomm and Samsung?

Well, we know that benchmarks, like Antutu, love to make use of extra cores to bump up scores, but, when it comes to real world performance, it’s very unlikely that you’ll be using applications which makes use of eight threads on a smartphone very often.

As Intel put it, not all cores are created equal. Those familiar with the current high-end Intel and AMD PC chip battle will also know that faster individual cores are sometimes required for heavy duty tasks, like gaming for example. Real world performance is going to vary a lot depending on the application, and in many instances I suspect that the Cortex A7s simply won’t be able to keep up with the newer Krait and Cortex architectures.

Secondly, there’s the GPU aspect of the Antutu results to take into consideration. The MT6592 is expected to ship with a quad-core Mali GPU, which again could certainly add a few more points to the overall score, and might help compensate for the lack of brute performance in the Cortex A7s.

But that’s enough skepticism, you’d expect the first true eight core mobile processor to put in a decent performance against today’s quad-core chips, and this score probably seems about right. Not to mention the potential power efficiency savings and quad-core GPU performance, this certainly could turn out to be a really good chip.

Sadly, it’s unlikely that the MT6592 will appear in western markets, instead it’s probably destined for use in cheaper Chinese products. But it will be interesting to see how this processor performs against the bigger names in some real world tests, once it’s released.