MediaTek today announced its latest flagship chip, the Helio X30. The Deca-core chip will be based on the 10nm fabrication process from TSMC making it smaller and more power efficient. Featuring 4x ‘low-power’ CortexA-35 cores clocked at 2GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz, and 2x Cortex-A73 cores at 2.8GHz, MediaTek promises that the Helio X30 will deliver up to 43% better performance than the Helio X20 and up to 53% improvement in power savings. The chipset also supports up to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, dual ISPs with support for camera sensors of up to 28MP, and WQXGA (2560 x 1600) displays at 60fps. While MediaTek has previously used GPUs from ARM, it will be using Imagination’s PowerVR IMG 7XTP GPU with up to 4 clusters clocked at 820MHz. The chipset will also be capable of playing back 4K 10-bit video at 30fps as well as capture them in 4K resolution. MediaTek chipsets have been known for their poor GPU performance, but it looks like the company is going to finally address the issue with its upcoming flagship chipset. It is also interesting to see Imagination Technologies provide its GPUs to MediaTek. The company has been supplying GPUs exclusively to Apple since a few years now. Slated to enter into production in the first half of 2017, the Helio X30 chipset should start making its way to devices from the second or third quarter. In addition to Helio X30, MediaTek also announced an upgraded version of Helio P20: the Helio P25. The chipset boasts of higher clock speeds while still being based on the 16nm fabrication process from TSMC. The company did not detail any other improvements of the chipset.
