Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek will reportedly launch two new mobile chipsets for the high-end smartphone market in 2018 (even though P-series chips belong in the mid-range segment, it’s a bit confusing), namely the MediaTek Helio P40 and Helio P70, both of which have apparently been leaked with new technical specifications in tow. According to the latest data, the Helio P40 and P70 will be manufactured by TSMC on a 12nm process and each chipset will employ eight ARM Cortex CPU cores while offering support for up to 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, as well as eMMC5.1 and UFS2.1 storage.
Furthermore, both chipset will apparently incorporate AI capabilities such as the Caffe deep learning framework and the TensorFlow open-source library, offering capabilities for AR and VR applications, 3D sensing, face recognition and so on. Similarities aside, the leaked spec sheet suggests that the MediaTek Helio P40 will make use of four ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores along with an additional four ARM Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz, as well as a Mali-G72 MP3 graphics processor operating at a frequency of 700MHz, and a modem capable of Cat.7 LTE connectivity. On the other hand, the MediaTek Helio P70 should offer four high-performance ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores clocked at up to 2.5GHz, four energy efficient Cortex-A53 cores operating at 2.0GHz, a Mali G72 MP4 GPU clocked at 800MHz, and support for Cat.12 LTE.
MediaTek’s semiconductor business hasn’t been very successful throughout 2017, especially in the high-end silicon market segment where the company’s Helio X30 chipset saw very few uses. Because of this and due to the fact that MediaTek’s plans for its 7nm-based chipsets have remained unknown, previous reports have suggested that the chipmaker might not launch any top-tier solutions in 2018. However, according to this recent leak both the Helio P40 and P70 will be built by TSMC on a 12nm process and will reportedly be officially introduced sometime in the second quarter of 2018 when they will be employed by OEMs including Gionee, Vivo, OPPO, as well as Xiaomi, the latter of which could also adopt one of these chips for its upcoming Redmi models featuring a full-screen form factor. In any case, while MediaTek continues to face strong opposition from competitors like Qualcomm, previous rumors suggested that chipmaker will offer the Helio P40 for a considerably lower price than the Snapdragon 660 Lite, thus boosting sales and paving the way for a more positive outcome at the end of 2018.