Tester Jobs Requirements (VIDEO GAME): The Rise of Mediatek SoCs

Thursday, September 7, 2017

The Rise of Mediatek SoCs

Until 2015, Mediateks SoCs were targeted firmly at the entry level market, largely in Asia, due to their relatively weak performance and lack of LTE support. At this time they also had a rather bad reputation for poor GPS performance, which did them no favours!

I would argue that their first noteworthy SoC was the MT6752 Octa-core A53 SoC, featuring LTE support and offering great value for money. This was released towards the end of 2014 and has proved to be a very popular choice in mid range Chinese handsets throughout 2015.

The more recent iterations of the MT67xx line have been rebranded as Helio, with the X series being targeted at the high / upper mid range and the P series targeted at the mid range.

Helio X10
Announced Q4 2014, first handset June 2015
8 Core, 28nm
8 x 2.2Ghz A53
PowerVR G6200 @ 700Mhz

The Helio X10, as found in the Xiaomi Redmi Note 2 and later the Redmi Note 3, offered excellent performance in very competitively priced handsets throughout the second half of 2015.

Helio X20
Announced May 2015, first handset expected April 2016
10 core, 20nm
2 x 2.5Ghz A72 + 4 x 2Ghz A53 + 4 x 1.4Ghz A53
Mali T880 MP4 @ 700Mhz

The Helio X20 was the first deca-core SoC to be announced, with the idea being that there would be three power clusters - low clocked A53s for power saving, high clocked A53s for standard app usage and a pair of A72s for high-end performance & gaming. While not quite up to the performance of the Exynos 8890 & Snapdragon 820 found in the latest top-tier phones, it will still perform better than the 2015 flagships.

Announced in May 2015, at the time of writing no phones have shipped with this SoC, although the first phones are expected to launch around April (e.g. Meizu MX6 & Pro 5 Mini).

Helio X30
Due to be Announced H1 2016
10 core, 16nm
4 x 2.5GHz A72 + 2 x 2GHz A72 + 2 x 1.5GHz A53 + 2 x 1GHz A35
Mali T880 MP4 @ 900Mhz?

The Helio X30 has yet to be officially announced, but is expected to offer an even more granular approach, with 2xA35s for very low power usage (these are ARMs most efficient ARMV8 cores), 2 x A53s for standard UI operations, 2 x A72 for performance and 4xA72s for very high performance.

What is interesting about Mediateks approach is that it is quite the opposite of Qualcomm & their Snapdragon SoCs with low core count, high IPC custom ARM cores, and even Samsung with their new M1 performance cores. Mediatek are solely using generic ARM cores, but using the full core range to offer up very high efficiency as well as high performance.

Android, in particular, offers surprisingly good multi-threading as can be seen in this rather interesting article on Anandtech. While Mediatek simply dont have the resources or expertise to create their own custom cores at this time, their approach is both interesting and successful.

download file now