Over the past two years, and really 2014 in particular, MediaTek has become the face of Chinese phones everywhere. MediaTek went from a company that produced mostly entry-level chipsets for the least expensive phones out there to producing some of the most efficient and cost-effective chips over the past 12 months or so. MediaTek’s chipsets power some of the biggest high profile Chinese phones out there including the Meizu MX4 from 2014, and MediaTek has been adding new phones to their portfolio of devices with every waking month. Now the company is looking to change its branding from just an entry-level and mid-range company to one that can compete with the biggest players on the mobile silicon block: Samsung and Qualcomm.
MediaTek’s newest chipsets are called the Helio X and Helio P, and both are aimed at different segments of the high-end market. The Helio X looks to be MediaTek’s new super high-end chipsets with a true 8-core octa-core chipset instead of the dual quad-core chipsets that we’ve seen from many architectures like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 and the Samsung Exynos 7420. All eight of these cores are slated to run at 2.2GHz when needed and all eight cores are ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit cores as well. This simply means that the performance out of this chipset will likely be staggering, with processing power that’ll likely rival that brand new laptop you just got. What’s going to be interesting is to see how the power consumption plays out and if these are significantly more efficient than they initially sound.
Raw power isn’t just the name of the game with the Helio X though, it’s looking to change the game in screen tech support and camera tech as well. Supporting up to 120Hz refresh rate for screens and up to 480FPS slow motion video and instant focus for cameras, the MediaTek Helio X may just eclipse everything else out there when it hits. MediaTek’s Helio P wasn’t talked about much other than its actual existence, but it’s likely that it’ll be in the same vein as the Helio X, possibly with a 64-bit quad core or something similar, but we’ll have to wait for more information on that one. Both chipsets are slated to make their debut this year with the first phones coming out in Q2 2015.
