MediaTek’s 10-core (deca core) chipset, the Helio X20, is expected to power smartphones in 2016. The chipset has yet to make a public appearance, officially. As far as leaks are concerned, the SoC has made an appearance on the Geekbench benchmark scores dubbed as the alps mt6797. The chipset has shown consistent results with scores over 7000 in the multi-core test. The scores show that the Helio X20 performs better than the Apple A9, Snapdragon 810, and Exynos 7420 in its multi-core performance. If information circulating the Internet is to be believed, then the chipset could gives the likes of the Snapdragon 820 and the Exynos 8890 a run for their money in multi-core performance.
Coming to the single-core performance of the Helio X20, the single-thread performance isn’t great, clocking scores under 2100. To put things into perspective, Apple's A9 SoC has scores above 2,500 points. This has led to the interpretation that the ARM Cortex-A72 cores that are in the X20 are not as powerful as the Apple A9 Twister cores.
How a 10-core CPU performs with real world usage is something we will have to wait and see when we get our hands on a smartphone powered by the Helio X20. In the past, MediaTek chipsets have had trouble with graphics output. How this fairs on the X20 is yet to be seen as the chipset has a quad-core ARM Mali-T880 GPU on board.
Looking at all the performance information available about the Helio X20, Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890, one thing is clear. The future of smartphone performance is very bright, and we can expect some serious computing horsepower under the hood of the little device that fits into your pocket. 2016 could be the year we see a drastic jump in smartphone performance, and innovations that can exploit the potential of these chipsets. The only thing left to make the smartphone an ultimate device is battery technology.
Source: Geekbench