MediaTek has announced what it claims is the world’s first proper octa-core SoC. The casual observer may be somewhat baffled by the claim, as Samsung’s Exynos 5 has been around for months, but that’s a big.LITTLE chip, with four A15 and four A7 cores.

MediaTek ‘s new chip is a real octa-core which allows all eight cores to run simultaneously. MediaTek says its approach gives the chip more flexibility, allowing it to tap more performance from less silicon. In spite of that, in many cases the octa-core is as power efficient as currently available quad-cores.

However, MediaTek did not share that many details about its new chip. We still don’t know anything about the clocks, the type of CPU cores or GPU cores for that matter. It sounds like an A7 part, but we cannot confirm it at this point.