MediaTek has officially announced its new flagship Helio X20 SoC for high end smartphones and tablets. The SoC has the company’s first 10 core System-on-a-Chip design. The 10 cores are arranged in a tri-cluster orientation which offers a new feature against the numerous dual-cluster big.LITTLE mixed CPU designs.
Helio X20 SoC has three clusters comprise of a low power quad-core A53 cluster clocked at 1.4 GHz, a power/performance balanced quad-core A53 cluster at 2.0GHz, and an extreme performance dual-core A72 cluster clocked in at 2.5 GHz. To achieve this tri-cluster design, MediaTek employed a custom interconnect IP called the MediaTek Coherent System Interconnect (MCSI). The bundled GPU has LPDDR3 RAM, running at 933 MHz which is slower than the new LPDDR4 found in the likes of the Exynos 7420 or Snapdragon 810, however it is expected to be sufficient for standard 1080p devices as well as QHD display resolution. Mediatek claims that the tri-cluster design is not only faster, but is also more power-efficient. According to the company Helio X20 consumes 30 % less power than the Helio x10 while decoding video and 40 % while encoding it. The X20 will be the first chip to use ARM’s latest Mali-T880 graphics technology.
The X20 SoC comes with features like 2160p30 10-bit H.264/HEVC/VP9 decode, 2160p30 HEVC w/HDR encode, support for a single image processor up to 32MP or dual 13MP cameras that are expected from a high end mobile chip. It also has MediaTek’s CDMA2000 compatible integrated modem and Category 6 LTE speeds of 300Mbps download and 50 Mbps upload. The SoC scored over 70,000 on the AnTuTu Benchmark, which is unheard of from a mobile SoC till date.
Mediatek had announced the Helio chipset 'X10' series earlier this year, featuring 64-bit support based on eight Cortex A53 cores and clocked at 2.2 GHz. The SoC supports display refresh rates at 120 MHz, and slo-mo videos at 480 fps. The first smartphones with MediaTek Helio SoC is expected to debut in Q2. Mediatek which has a presence in midrange and budget smartphones is planning to tap into the top end segment with the new SoC. The Mediatek Helio X20 will take on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 series and Samsung's Exynos 7 Octa SoC.