MediaTek have today announced a new chipset, the MediaTek Helio P15, which represents a polishing of the successful MediaTek Helio P10. The source website implies that the Helio P15 is based around an octa-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 application processor, which may now be clocked at up to 2.2 GHz from the 2.0 GHz of the original Helio P10. However, the MediaTek Helio P10 is based around a big.LITTLE architecture with one quad core cluster of ARM Cortex-A53 processors capable of running at 2.0 GHz and the lower performance core only capable of a maximum clock speed of 1.0 GHz. It is unclear if the new Helio P15 has a similar big.LITTLE arrangement with perhaps one cluster capable of operating at up to 2.0 GHz and the other at 2.2 GHz, or perhaps some other combination of clock speeds – or if all eight of the Helio P15’s application processors can run at up to 2.2 GHz. MediaTek claim that the new chipset is some 10% more powerful than the old one, which could be explained by the maximum clock speed being 10% higher.
The new Helio P15 does come with an improved GPU: the Helio P10 uses a dual core ARM Mali-T860MP2 GPU with a maximum clock speed of 700 MHz. The Helio P15 uses a similar GPU but the maximum clock speed has been increased to 800 MHz. It is not clear if MediaTek have increased memory bandwidth or performance, but the source website believes that the Helio P15 still uses single channel LPDDR3-933 RAM. Another feature believed to have been carried over from the original Helio P10 is support for up to LTE Cat. 6 networking performance. Furthermore, the Helio P15 is still being built on a TSMC 28nm HPC+ manufacturing process, the same as the MediaTek Helio P10 chipset. In addition to MediaTek’s claim of 10% better performance, the chipset designer also claims that the Helio P15 benefits from power consumption benefits.
The MediaTek Helio P10 was the first of MediaTek’s sub-brand named chipset modules. It’s proven to be a successful system-on-chip and has seen service in a large number of devices. The follow up chipset represents a relatively minor improvement over the original, which perhaps reflects that the Helio P10 managed to get many things right. It is not yet clear when the Helio P15 will be available in consumer devices, but it is likely to be a popular choice for mid-range devices.