The Realme U1 (review) became the first smartphone to be powered by the MediaTek Helio P70 and the Taiwanese chipset-designer is already teasing another premium mid-range chipset — The Helio P90. While the P70 is still expected to power more devices and an unreleased MediaTek Helio P80 is topping AI benchmark charts, the Helio P90 will reportedly be “powerful, efficient and have groundbreaking AI”.
MediaTek posted a teaser video on Twitter claiming higher speed, efficiency and “groundbreaking AI”, but revealed nothing more. The AI part of the claims could be believable considering the Helio P80 recently topped a dedicated AI benchmark. It came second to Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8150.
MediaTek’s dream of having a flagship high-end chipset ended with the poor performance of the Helio X30 chipset, and since then the company has majorly focused on improving the mid-rangee segment. The Helio P60 has powered devices in India ranging from the sub-10,000 segment to ones priced above Rs 20,000. The Helio P70 is the successor to the popular chipset and is built on a 12nm FinFET manufacturing process promising higher efficiency. It also features a multi-core APU to better handle AI tasks.
The Helio P80 has not been officially announced but rumours about the chipset reveal it will be built on the same 12nm manufacturing process by TSMC but with a new architecture with further improvements in AI. In the AI benchmark, the Helio P80 outperformed the newly announced Kirin 980 by Huawei that is built on a 7nm process.
The Helio P80 is expected to debut in the Oppo R19 next year. According to a report by Taiwan Business Times, MediaTek has worked hard on the new chipset to be considered for the Oppo flagship. To note, the Oppo R15 marked the debut of the Helio P60 in the first half of 2017, but the Oppo R17 switched to a Qualcomm chipset.
Taiwanese supply chain sources have revealed that the MediaTek Helio P80 will be the company’s flagship product for the first half of 2019 and will have an ARM-based octa-core CPU architecture. It seems strange for MediaTek to tease the successor to an unreleased chipset, but we suppose it could have something to do with Qualcomm announcing it’s new flagship chipset on December 4.