Taiwanese mobile chipset maker MediaTek had announced earlier this year that it was going to release a 10-core SoC that would threaten the performance supremacy of Samsung's Exynos 7420 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810. The company has not yet showcased additional details concerning the feature-enriched chipset. Starting off, MT6797 is the name of the 'system on a chip' and has been given the codename Helio X20. The primary difference separating Helio X20 and the other chipsets is that the latter does not feature ARM's Cortex-A57 processing cores, which consumes far too much battery life compared to the performance it can deliver.
Instead, MT6797 will comprise of the following processing cores:
- 2 Cortex-A72 at 2.3-2.5 GHz
- 4 Cortex-A53 at 2 GHz
- 4 Cortex-A53 at 1.4 GHz
Cortex-A72 will be able to deliver unprecedented performance and energy efficiency compared to Cortex-A57. In addition, the powerful processing cores will also provide support for 4K video recording up to 120 frames per second. Side by side, a new feature called 4K HDR video will also be included inside the upcoming chip. For graphical performance, ARM's Mali-T880 MP4 (a total of 4 GPU cores) will be assimilated, featuring a GPU clock speed of 700 MHz. The high performing mobile graphics processor will allow products to render resolutions that measure in at 2560 by 1600 pixels.
There are few similarities shared between MT6797 and Snapdragon 810. Firstly, both SoCs are manufactured on the 20 nm process and both of them feature Cortex-A53 cores. However, Helio X20 will effortlessly be able to overpower Snapdragon 810 in performance and energy efficiency tests. Unfortunately MediaTek's MT6797 does not possess a Cat 9 LTE modem and LPDDR4 type memory, both of which are present in Snapdragon 810.
MediaTek has already given samples of its chipset to Chinese phone makers such as Xioami and Vivo in an attempt to sway them away from incorporating Qualcomm's flagship chipset. The company will begin the shipping operation to phone manufacturers during the summer period. Handsets sporting the powerful chipset will most likely be released during early winter.
