14 DAY TRIAL // MediaTek recently held a press event in China during which it officially unveiled the 10nm Helio X30 and 16nm Helio P25 chipsets. The Helio X30 is the company's latest flagship, while the mid-ranger Helio P25 will surely be featured on many upcoming smartphones.
The Helio X30 comes with a 10 core chip with two 2.8GHz A73 cores, four 2.2GHz A53 cores and four 2GHz A35 cores on TSMC’s 10 nm FinFET+ process, according to XDA Developers. In addition, it can support up to 8GB of RAM and 1866MHz LPDDR4x RAM, UFS 2.1 and faster image processing.
The company claims that the new chipset supports up to 28MP at 30 fps and video encode at up to 4K 30Hz, and it comes with hardware accelerated video decode with support for HEVC and VP9. It will surely be featured on smartphones with 2560 x 1600 and 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution displays.
Helio X30 comes with PowerVR graphics
The X30 comes with PowerVR 7XTP-MT4 (850 MHz) graphics, as the company switched away from ARM Mali graphics processing units. The graphics processing unit will run at either a 4 cluster or 4 thread configuration at 820MHz. It will come with double RAM speed compared to the Helio X20 and X25.
It will be interesting to see how the Helio X30 compares in real world performance to Qualcomm's latest processors, the Snapdragon 820 and 821, which are said to be featured on Google's upcoming Pixel phones.
MediaTek also presented the Helio P20, which was recently released for sampling to manufacturers. It will be produced on TSMC's 16nm FFC node and have 8 A53 cores clocked at 2.3GHz. The chipset will be coupled with the Mali-T880 MP2 graphics processing unit at 900 MHz.
It will work with either 6GB or 4GB of RAM and will come with video encoding at 4k 30Hz. Without doubt, the new chipsets will be featured in many upcoming smartphones. MediaTek didn't say much about the Helio P25, but it's expected to be a higher clocked variant of the P20.