If you follow developments in the US smartphone and tablet market, you are at least passingly familiar with the big names in the industry. Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia are the major ARM developers, while Intel’s recent Medfield, Clover Trail, and just-unveiled Silvermont products offer an increasingly significant challenge to the ARM tetrarchy. AMD has its own plans as well, though these are largely confined to the W8 tablet space.

Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia account for the lion’s share of the high-end mobile market, but they’re not the only players. Two other fabless design manufacturers, AllWinner and MediaTek, are increasingly hungry for a piece of the lucrative mobile pie.

MediaTek moves to challenge

MediaTek was founded in 1997 as a spinoff from Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corporation, or UMC. It started off as a controller chip manufacturer for CD and DVD drives but has pushed into mobile devices and wireless products. Total sales for 2012 in US dollars were $3.3 billion — and while that’s not in Samsung or Qualcomm territory, it’s nothing to sneeze at. The company has recently begun shipping several higher-profile products, including its MT6572 SoC. The less-than-sexy name cloaks a dual-core Cortex-A7 SoC at 1.2GHz with an integrated WiFi radio, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radio tuner all on board.

This is MediaTek’s second Cortex-A7 product — it launched a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC late in 2012. One reason the chip stands out is that MediaTek has eschewed ARM’s big.LITTLE strategy to explicitly focus on the little end of the equation. ARM has mostly positioned the Cortex-A7 as a low-power companion for the Cortex-A15 and a way to improve total device efficiency by using a svelte low-power core as much as possible. MediaTek believes the Cortex-A7 has enough horsepower to drive a lower-end smartphone on its own, and has designed chips on 28nm technology to help make that happen.

MediaTek’s idea for these chips is to create a market around lower-end smartphones whose users care about battery life but still want an acceptable level of performance. The Cortex-A7, meanwhile, should be up to the challenge. Benchmarks of the quad-core version point to an acceptably snappy chip that trades some synthetic performance for less power consumption — exactly what MediaTek is targeting. If the dual-core variant does so as well, it could be strong competition for lower-end Snapdragons and Intel’s Atom.

The high-end quad-core variant, the MT6589T, recently broke cover and is proving to be a potent competitor for slightly older smartphones. Recently published benchmarks show the chip edging out the HTC One X (the Nvidia Tegra 3 version) and surpassing the Google Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 in the AnTuTu benchmark. These are only two tests, to be sure, but the Taiwanese vendor is clearly capable of fielding hardware that can compete at more than the bottom end of the market.

Next page: Allwinner amps up…