MediaTek has just announced a new mobile chipset, the Helio G85. The new chipset joins the Taiwanese chipmaker’s Helio G80 in its mid-range gaming chipsets lineup. The latter was announced earlier in February.
The Helio G85 has already made its debut on Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 9. Starting at $199, the handset offers up to 4GB of RAM, 128GB storage, a quad-camera setup, a big 5,020mAh battery with 18W fast wired charging, and much more.
MediaTek Helio G85 specifications
There isn’t much of a difference between the Helio G85 and G80. Like all the other Helio G chipsets, the new Helio G85 is also an octa-core SoC built on a 12nm FinFET Process. It has two ARM Cortex-A75 cores operating at 2.0GHz, and 6 smaller power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores.
MediaTek has yet to detail the clock speed of the six A55 cores but reports suggest they are clocked at 1.8GHz. This essentially means the Helio G85 has the same CPU as the Helio G80. So where do they differ?
Well, MediaTek seems to have designed the G85 with a specific purpose. The company is promoting the new chipset with the tagline “Made for everyday gamers” and it appears to come with a slightly more powerful GPU. In fact, it’s the same GPU performing at a higher speed.
The Helio G85 gets the Mali-G52 MC2 GPU with a maximum GPU frequency of 1000MHz. The older Helio G80 has its Mali-G52 MC2 GPU clocked at 950MHz.
MediaTek is yet to release the full spec sheet of the new chipset. So details about its NPU, ISP, camera and display specs, and connectivity features remain unknown as of now. It’s not like we’ll see big changes over the Helio G80 in any of these departments, though.
The Helio G85 seemingly only boasts a GPU frequency bump of just 5oMHz over the Helio G80, which is quite disappointing. Even the Helio G70 isn’t much different. It has the six Cortex-A55 cores running just 0.1Ghz slower at 1.7GHz while its Mali-G52 MC2 GPU running at 820MHz.
MediaTek Helio G85 outperforms Snapdragon 665 and Exynos 9611
The Helio G85 does beat Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 665 and Samsung’s Exynos 9611 by quite a margin though, at least according to benchmark scores displayed by Xiaomi during the Redmi Note 9 series launch.
The new chipset has got a score of 205,946 in the AnTuTu Benchmark. The Snapdragon 665-powered Redmi Note 8 scored 169,585 while the Exynos 9611-powered Samsung Galaxy A51 scored 177,439.
So if AnTuTu scores are trustable enough for performance comparison, the Helio G85 quite easily outperforms Snapdragon 665 and Exynos 9611.
However, this hardly justifies its existence when the Helio G80 is already there. It appears to be a mere marketing stunt by MediaTek.