Earlier this year, there were reports that MediaTek had re-branded its MT679X range to the Helio X series, with ‘X’ ostensibly standing for extreme performance. The current flagship from that range is the top of the line Helio X10 SoC (System on Chip), that’s currently found in the newly released HTC One M9+ among other devices. More recently, multiple leaks have revealed that there’s a new SoC about to dethrone the current flagship and it’s been dubbed the Helio X20. The rumored chip is said to feature 10 processing cores in a Tri-Cluster architecture, instead of the 8 processing cores seen in most current flagships including MediaTek’s own outgoing flagship MT6795 (Helio X10) and from Qualcomm (Snapdragon 810), Samsung (Exynos 5433) and Nvidia (Tegra X1). The new processor is said to offer a 40% boost in performance compared to the current generation Helio X10 chips.
Yesterday, a report out of Taiwan had shed some light on the much rumored chipset. It said that the new MT6797 chipset will feature two Cortex A72 cores and 4 + 4 Cortex A53 cores in ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture. The A72 cores will boost raw performance, while the A53 ones will be more power-efficient. The chip was already rumored to be powerful enough to break 70,000 on AnTuTu. The Helio X20 will reportedly be built on TSMC’s (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 20nm process and will come with a Cat. 6 LTE-A radio. Today, some more leakage has provided us with new information about the MT6797. The new set of leaked images show that the 2 Cortex A72 cores will run at 2.5 GHz and that, out of the 8 Cortex-A53 cores, four will run at 2.0GHz, and four will run at a maximum of 1.4 GHz, thereby reducing battery consumption and increasing efficiency. Another slide confirms previous rumors that the chip scored above 70,000 on the AnTuTu Benchmark.
The upcoming Helio X20 chipset will in all likelihood go into mass production this year itself – as early as July if the reports are to be believed, meaning that OEMs will probably start shipping devices with it by the end of the year. The leaked slides that form the basis of this report can be viewed below.
