Many tech-savvy people would say that Qualcomm and Samsung make the best mobile processors out there at the moment. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 and Samsung’s Exynos 8890 mobile SoCs are quite probably the most powerful offerings out there, but Huawei really stepped up their game with their Kirin 960 processor, and MediaTek is also closing the gap. MediaTek’s Helio X20, Helio X25 and Helio P10 SoCs were quite popular over the last year or so, and the company had already introduced the Helio X30, their upcoming flagship SoC, not to mention that the Helio P20 is already being utilized in some devices, and the Meizu M3X is a great example, as it was introduced yesterday.
Having that in mind, MediaTek has just announced two new deca-core processors, the Helio X23 and Helio X27. These are basically more powerful variants of MediaTek’s Helio X20 and Helio X25 chips that have been available out there for quite some time now. MediaTek says that the Helio X23 and Helio X27 deliver better performance, consume less battery and offer better camera quality, in comparison with their previous offerings, of course. “MediaTek Helio X27 offers a speed upgrade over the currently highest-end X25, operating at 2.6GHz for the ARM Cortex-A72 cores and 875MHz for the ARM Mali GPU. Both products deliver more than a 20% overall processing improvement and significant increases in web browsing and application launching speeds based on MediaTek-engineered advancements in the CPU/GPU heterogeneous computing scheduling algorithm,” says MediaTek.
The Helio X23 and Helio X27 feature the Tri-Cluster deca-core architecture, which is nothing new when it comes to MediaTek’s SoCs. You do get two ARM Cortex-A72, four ARM Cortex-A53 and four additional, separate ARM Cortex-A53 cores here, along with the company’s CorePilot 3.0 technology which is meant to maximize power efficiency. These two processors ship with the ARM Mali T880 MP4 GPU and support up to 4GB 2x LPDDR3 RAM running at 800MHz. Both processors also support dual camera setups, and come with the upgraded MediaTek Imagiq image signal-processing technology, which should improve image clarity, exposure control, saturation, portrait performance and various other aspects of photography.
On top of all this, the Helio X23 and Helio X27 include MiraVision EnergySmart Screen power-saving technology. This technology actually modifies the smart display parameters based on ambient lighting and the on-screen content. MediaTek says that this could result in up to 25% reduction in display power consumption, which sounds great, but we’ll see how it works in real life. In case you’d like to see the spec comparison between the Helio X23, Helio X27, Helio X20 and Helio X25, take a look at the image down below.