MediaTek’s recent announcement of the Helio P22 SoC apparently came as a surprise to industry insiders, who reportedly expect the company to release an updated Helio P60 SoC at some point this year. That’s according to recent reports out of the company’s home country which suggests that chipset is still suspected to be on the way by the end of 2018. No in-depth details have been provided with regard to how the updated Helio P60 would be improved. The chip would reportedly be built on the same 12nm FinFET process as its P22-branded silicone and would still be aimed for use in the mid-range of the Android spectrum. The current Helio P60 was also only just launched at MWC 2018 and features a dedicated neural processing chip to support MediaTek’s NeuroPilot technology. It also already supports Android’s Neural Network and other A.I. frameworks.
Another aspect that makes it difficult to gauge where improvement could be made is in the current Helio P60 specifications. Setting aside the A.I. aspects of the SoC, that chip is an octa-core unit with four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2GHz. The included GPU, a Mali G72 MP3, was the latest high-performance graphics unit on offer from ARM when the Helio P60 was announced. A newer Mali G76 has been revealed since then but reportedly only makes small updates to the compute capabilities of the GPU. Meanwhile, the Helio P60 already supports dual camera setups at up to 20-megapixels and 16-megapixels or a single 32-megapixel sensor.
Having said all of that, and as mentioned already, there just doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of room for improvement for MediaTek’s Helio P60 right now. If the company has managed to improve its core A.I. socket or silicone, then there may be some weight to the expectation. Furthermore, that would also make sense if the company has improved its processor efficiency since that would feasibly allow for improvements on the power-usage side of the equation. The company may also just be updating the SoC to include its new Helio M70 5G-ready modem. Until the company comes forward with more information, it may be best to keep the speculative nature of the reported expectations in mind and not get too excited just yet.