MediaTek's popularity stems from fitting its SoCs into smartphones that carry an affordable price. These chipsets exude adequate level of performance, which is targeted to those consumers who do not engage in heavy multitasking or gaming applications. Now, the company's upcoming Helio lineup of chipsets are going to take the fight directly to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 and Samsung's Exynos 7420 chipset. According to Gizchina, a conference was held in Beijing in which the company's executives were present in order to debrief the attendance on the company's upcoming product lineup.
According to the website, MediaTek's Helio lineup will feature the following:
- Helio X
- Helio P
Helio X will be fitted in to high-end smartphones that will square off against those handsets that are sporting Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 along with Samsung's Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge. In addition, Helio P SoCs will be fitted into smartphones that provide performance that is a little over than what mid-tier handsets bring to the table. The company's MT6795 is expected to be the first SoC belonging to the Helio 'system on a chip' lineup, although it has not been confirmed which category it will belong to.
The chipset will comprise of an octa-core package that will feature ARM's Cortex-A53 CPU clocked in at 2.2 GHz. It is possible that MediaTek did not choose to add ARM's Cortex-A57 because the processor would consume too much power and in return, disseminate substantial amounts of heat, which is an unwelcome feature in a mobile device. Most importantly, it would obviously raise the cost figure, which forced MediaTek to incorporate a lesser performing CPU and allow it to deliver similar processing performance of its higher performing counterparts by increasing its default clock speed.
Additional chipsets belonging to Helio will be fabricated on the 20 nm lithographic process. In the future, these SoCs will also be featuring ARM's Cortex-A72 CPU, which is ARM's current flagship performer. While the following has not been confirmed, it is expected that MediaTek will be unveiling its MT6795 from April 15, 2015. The remainder of the company's chipsets are expected to be released later in the year.
