News out of the company’s home region of Taiwan apparently confirms a brand new chipset from MediaTek, to be marketed at the Helio P40, which the company hopes will bolster its sales next year. That’s thanks to the fact that it will reportedly be priced to compete at between $11 and $12 per chip. The report compared the cost of the chip to a similar offering from Qualcomm – the Snapdragon 660 Lite – which is priced at around $15. If that comparison is accurate, that also places the Helio P40 firmly in the mid-range with regards to Android smartphone hardware in general.
As to the SoC itself, the company expects sales of the Helio P40 to increase overall shipments of its Helio series chips from a 15-percent share through 2017 up to a 25-percent share in 2018. Moreover, companies such as OPPO, Meizu, and Xiaomi have already been putting in requests for the Helio P40, according to MediaTek. Despite that many of the manufacturers across the global market are reportedly looking to feature 10-nanometer SoCs for their future devices, the Helio P40 was created using a 12-nanometer process. The report also mentions that MediaTek’s Helio P40 will be an octa-core SoC and will, of course, support 4G networks. Interestingly, the octa-core described in this report is in direct contradiction to previously reported rumors suggesting the Helio P40 would only arrive with six cores.
With that said, no further information about the new chip’s features has been revealed here. So there’s no way of actually knowing, in terms of clock speeds, graphics chips, or other features, what else the Helio P40 will bring to the table. Speculation has suggested that the chipset would be comprised of two ARM A73 cores and four ARM Cortex A53 cores and those reports went further to postulate that the result would be a chipset that performs 40-percent better and is 30-percent more energy efficient than the previous Helio P30. However, those numbers are unlikely to still be accurate if there are eight cores used instead of six. What the actual figures are, in the meantime, will likely remain unknown until MediaTek announces something officially.