MediaTek's standard lets your devices share their hardware

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/01/mediatek-crossmount/

There are plenty of standards for sharing your media collection between devices, but what if you want to borrow a device's camera or display? MediaTek thinks it has an answer. Its new CrossMount standard lets devices share their hardware and software when they're on the same WiFi network, letting you use whichever components make sense in a given situation. You can use your phone's mic to dictate voice commands to your TV, for example, or use your phone's webcam for a video chat on your tablet.

CrossMount is an open standard based on the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) standard you probably have in some of your existing gear, so it might be easy to implement when it's available in the third quarter of the year. A few big East Asian TV and mobile device makers have already hopped on the bandwagon, including Changhong, Hisense, Lenovo and TCL. With that said, it's hard to know if anyone else will bite. There are still a lot of other companies that haven't signed on, and big names like Samsung or LG may prefer to use in-house tech for any device sharing.

Not that MediaTek is putting all its eggs in one basket -- it has a few chips in store as well. The darling is the MT8173, a 64-bit processor that's supposedly the "highest performing" CPU you can get in a tablet. It mates two high-end Cortex-A72 cores with two low-power Cortex-A53 cores to deliver about six times (!) the performance of last year's MT8125, or enough to handle 4K video with ease. And fans of mid-range phones might like the MT6753, an eight-core 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor. Neither is available just yet, though. The MT6753 won't reach devices you can buy until the second quarter of the year, while the range-topping MT8173 isn't poised to show up until the second half.

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Tablets, HD, Mobile

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Source: MediaTek