MediaTek has stepped up its bid for Qualcomm’s crown boldly, launching the mobile device world’s first 10-core applications processor, the Helio X20. The product breaks all kinds of records, and highlights the intense innovation which is going on in the ARM-based market, as those firms blessed with an architectural licence come out with highly differentiated approaches. In MediaTek’s case, this is not so much about the number of cores – which Qualcomm will no doubt dismiss as unnecessary at this stage of smartphone development, as it initially did with octacore and 64-bit. It is also about the ‘tri-cluster’ architecture of Helio X20, a different take on power management from Qualcomm’s, or from ARM’s Big:little. With tri-cluster, MediaTek allows the chipset…