Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind, this phone utilizes a Chinese MTK6589 processor and god knows what else for chips. Unless MTK is committing intellectual property violations, many games won't be optimized for this device, if that's your thing (it seems to be a lot of people's things).

I'm really struggling to buy into Fairphone's vision when it appears they started with a cheap Chinese reference design with cheap Chinese parts manufactured in Chinese factories. It's a good start, though.

Edit: Here's the block diagram for the CPU:

http://www.cnx-software.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Media...

The GPU appears to use LPDDR2 memory, which causes it to falter in benchmarks against devices with the same GPU cores (the standard right now is LPDDR3 GPU mem)

It is a quad-core ARM Cortex A7 with an Imagination PowerVR 544 GPU, so, yes, it is a low power, low cost, low performance device.

But why would you think MTK is comitting any intellectual property violations with the design?

Because China is an easy target for suspicion and scorn. An outlook heavily pushed and perpetuated by our (western) media outlets.

To be fair, there is global suspicion and scorn for Chinese manufacturing, including from Chinese people themselves.

Seriously, some of the most cynical people I know concerning China, are Chinese. They know what's going on...

S/he isn't saying that they are, simply pointing out that unless you believe that to be the case you should expect a performance deficit beyond what mere specs suggest.

I guess that by acknowledging the possibility they give credence to the idea? But the tone implies that the author does not believe in the idea themselves.

I am a bit worried about the performance of the phone, too. Couldn't find reliable benchmarks of the chipset, yet.

I didn't accuse MTK of stealing IP.

I was pointing out that most games are optimized for the Snapdragon and Tegra families of chips. So unless MTK is "borrowing" the IP from one of those two, many games aren't going to run great.

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