After years of building up its portfolio in the low-end brackets of Android smartphones, and through the increase in exposure of the rise of developing markets, MediaTek is now announcing an SoC that the company believes can give other big-name top SoCs a run for their money.
We are talking about the Helio X30, a continuation of the higher-end Helio lineup of chipsets, this time bringing forth a revised architechture and a new process size. MediaTek will manufacture the Helio X30 with a 10nm process, which will certainly aid it in terms of efficiency — especially over the now-chunky 20nm process size of previous MediaTek SoCs. Furthermore, the X30 will once more opt for multiple core clusters – adding up to 10 cores – but it’ll now come with two of ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores for the heavy lifting.
The A73 is up to 30% more powerful than the currently-popular A72 design, and the X30 is reportedly bringing those up to 2.8 GHz. To help with battery and low-intensity tasks, there are also two clusters of four Cortex-A35 cores, one clocked at 2.2 GHz and the other at 2 GHz. The CPU side is then aided by a quad-core PowerVR 7XT GPU. As for RAM, the chipset can support up to 8GB of RAM (LPDDR4). Finally, the X30 supports camera sensors of up to 16MP with 60FPS, or 8MP at up to 120FPS.
All of this sounds fine-and-dandy for a higher-end chipset, and while its manufacturing process and A73 core setup might sound impressive at the moment, the chipset is not expected until 2017, meaning other SoC lines will also have time to up their ante. The X30 seems to bring a powerful package nevertheless, with a deca-core setup that benefits from smart global task scheduling. It remains to be seen whether this will put MediaTek in a better position, but seeing more competitive alternatives ultimately benefits the consumer, directly or indirectly.
What do you think of the X30? Let us know in the comments down below!
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