[The] Micromax A116 has the MediaTek MT6589 processor, which the company claims is the world’s first commercially viable quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC.
MediaTek and Renesas tend to just be cool...but not much for high performance.
Maybe not cool if you live in a world of $300+ devices being your minimums, and need high performance gaming in your pocket, but for the rest of the world...
Anyone out here can please comment on how much powerful this MT6589 is, given that it is powered by a quad core A7.
Not very. The A7 should be around the performance of a Cortex-A8 per CPU core, though seems to have some overall improvements, too. The main draw is that they can have a quad, and either make a small new chip, or space-efficient current-/old-tech chip, and get good battery life, and a decent profit. It's in-order, not made for high clocks, and sports a half-width FPU, compared to what we're used to from top end ARM CPUs.
It might not even be able to able to compete with a single core of an A9-class CPU, even with an efficient multithreaded program, especially one from a vendor that has optimized their design, either of the SoC only (nVidia, FI), or end to end (Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple). However, Android and Windows (for all of it's 10 users
) can make decent use of a quad core, even with more general use cases, especially when battery life is in question. They'll get it taken care of with higher-end chips, too, but either by lots of expensive R&D into a chip good at racing to idle, with lots of low power states, or by lots of expensive R&D to make a big.LITTLE swapping CPU pair, with a larger CPU taking up more die space. With Dalvik doing JIT, these days, the slower CPUs are perfectly fine, for lighter users.
It's mainly a CPU to aid in bringing cheaper SoCs out that can run newer software, thus reducing the cost of entry. IE, $100 brand new smartphones that don't suck for day to day phone/tablet use. It's a weak CPU, no matter how you look at it, but it's also going to be cheaper, and the SoC has all the main features you'd need. There's a potentially huge market for those that can get the price down on new phones with good displays, good touch panels, and up to date features (OpenGL ES v x.y, 1080p HW record+encode, LTE modem integrated, etc.) down to a price lower than that of a luxury/business item. But, you're not going to make that happen with cutting edge performance. The higher R&D and validation costs alone will keep the chips from becoming cheap enough.
Those numbers are terrible for a CPU that has just hit the market IMO
How do you figure? It's 4x faster, with the Quadrant bench, than a Pantech Crossover. Regular folk, who wear tennis shoes, or the occasional python boot, and haven't worshiped at the altar of Apple or Samsung, use phones like that, or maybe the Huawei Ascend II, as they have no need of anything really fancy, performance-wise, and would lose sleep if they had to carry around a $400+ device that could be fried with an accidental coffee spill, when there are cheaper options. The lower end for a nice smart phone today is $250, though lower-end ones, like the $100 Ascend Y, do the job almost as well. For a lot of people, especially those who might question the value of a smart phone, having all the features is more important than having lots of performance. Getting the price down, without sacrificing features, and without using really bad displays, is a big deal.
I been checking some of the good phones with it and most are dangerously close in price to the Nexus 4, it only makes sense to buy one if you live in a country where the N4 isn't available.
The cheapest new Nexus 4 on eBay, FI, is $335. The Huawei G520 starts at $220. The price differences compress when looking at options other than unlocked phones, or from larger retailers, but there's still typically a $50-100 difference.
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