[userbinator]

Mediatek (MTK) was for many years the SoC of choice for ultra-cheap feature phones like these, but they seem to have gone up the scale (their Android platforms are good value) while others like RDA have filled in the ultra-low-end.

I think one of the ways in which they were able to undercut MTK was to use a different CPU core - the $2 MT6250 in bunnie's phone still uses an ARM core, which means licensing fees to ARM are some part of the cost (I'm not aware of any "pirated" ARM cores) - and in such a cheap SoC, could be a significant fraction. The RDA8851 is "MIPS-compatible" so they aren't paying ARM and likely the other IP on it was either designed by RDA or others in China.

[minthd]

With such capabilities it's pretty weird that such companies aren't fiercely competing in the mcu market(at least in the high end of it). They could have made a killer mcu for very cheap.