MediaTek isn’t a name as popular as that of Qualcomm or NVIDIA, but the Chinese chip maker’s mobile processors are arguably as widespread as Qualcomm’s, thanks to a booming low-end and mid-range segment in emerging markets like India and China. Now, with its new MT6595 chipset, MediaTek is finally ready to take the competition to Qualcomm in two key categories where it has always played catch up – performance and connectivity.

The MT6595 is the first MediaTek chip that has an on-board LTE chip, the lack of which on competing chipsets has been one of the main reasons Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors have been so successful. Even Samsung hasn’t managed to integrate LTE on its Exynos processors, so with the 4G LTE market set to boom in China, MediaTek now has a leg up over Qualcomm in one of the most important upcoming smartphone markets. In technical terms, the MT6595 will work on GSM, TD-SCDMA, WCDMA, TD-LTE and FDD-LTE, basically supporting every network that is in use in China at the moment.

In terms of performance, the MT6595 should be the first chip that can compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 chip. It uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture with four Cortex-A17 cores for performance intensive tasks and four Cortex-A7 cores for simple tasks. All eight cores can be active simultaneously, and graphics performance should also be killer thanks to the use of the PowerVR G600 GPU clocked at up to 600MHz. Given the cheaper licensing costs for MediaTek chips, that could result in mid-range devices approaching the horsepower of high-end handsets from better known manufacturers like Samsung or HTC can offer. 

Apart from LTE connectivity and high-end performance, the MT6595 also supports 4K video recording, which is quickly becoming one of the important features on flagship smartphones these days. It can’t power 4K displays just yet, but it does have the capability of providing resolutions up to 2560×1600, which means it’s also well poised to power upcoming smartphones that use Quad HD (2K) displays.

With the MT6595, MediaTek is finally offering white-box phone and tablet manufacturers a cheaper way to offer high-end performance and ultra-fast connectivity to consumers, something Qualcomm, NVIDIA and other chip makers will have to find a way to compete with pretty quickly, lest they miss the chance to ride the wave of smartphone growth that’s set to bloom in China, India, and other such emerging markets.

In fact, with even the LG G3 rumored to be powered by the MT6595, it’s not only emerging markets MediaTek is looking to get a hold on, so that’s another thing the bigger names in chip manufacturing might want to consider going forward.