MediaTek plans to step up its game against the likes of Qualcomm and Samsung and the companies' Snapdragon 810 and Exynos 7420 SoCs. The Taiwanese firm plans on accomplishing this through the release of its Helio X20 chipset, which is going to feature a 10-core processor comprising up of two Cortex-A72 cores, and eight Cortex-A53 cores.
According to a video uploaded by ARMDevices, the upcoming mobile chipset is going to consume 30-40 percent less power in contrast to a Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 processor combo. While Cortex-A72's reduced power consumption over Cortex-A57 will be an added benefit, the major role is actually going to be played by MediaTek's own CorePilot 3.0. This particular series of instructions will distribute the load between the processor and GPU (ARM's Mali-T880 will be running inside Helio X20 at a clock speed of 700 MHz).
The load will be switched to either side of the component depending on what kind of task is being carried out, which will eventually result in reduced power consumption. Coming back to the details of the deca-core processor present in Helio X20; while eight cores of Cortex-A53 will be running inside the chipset, four of them will be running at different frequencies.
One quad-core package will be running at 2 GHz, while the other one will be running at a clock speed of 1.4 GHz, and will be designed to tackle the less intensive tasks. Helio X20 is yet to be present in smartphones in order to draw up a proper comparison between top Android device chipsets like Snapdragon 810 and Exynos 7420.
While some critics might state that Helio X20's 20 nm process will be at a severe disadvantage when squaring off with Exynos 7420, the presence of Cortex-A72 will be the game changer when both performance and energy efficiency metrics are taken in to account.
Handsets featuring the SoC will most likely be introduced during Q3, 2015, after which a proper comparison can be drawn properly.
