MediaTek Helio P10 chipset: a mid-ranged SoC for affordable smartphones

MediaTek’s official website

After the release of the high-end Helio X20, which is also known as MT6797, MediaTek has announced another mobile chipset called Helio P10. The SoC has been manufactured on the 28 nm process and is expected to be present in affordable handsets. These affordable smartphones might carry a low price tag, but MediaTek intends on connecting the globe with cheaply price devices that deliver impressive processing results.

Unlike Helio X20, Helio P10 features an octa-core processor belonging to Cortex-A53. All eight cores are going to be running on a frequency of 2 GHz. It is hardly surprising that Cortex-A57 is not a part of Helio P10, or Helio X20 for that matter. Due to the processor's overheating attribute, MediaTek made the smart choice by increasing the overall clock speed of Cortex-A53 in order to deliver both performance and efficiency.

Additionally, Helio P10 also features an ARM Mali-T860 mobile graphics processor, which is the same processor that is going to be present inside Huawei's Kirin 940 SoC. The GPU will be running at a clock speed of 700 MHz, which should be sufficient to provide above-par performance in demanding mobile gaming applications. Since Helio P10 was processed on the 28 nm architecture, it would obviously mean that production costs would be lowered thanks to an inferior architecture.

While the chipset will not be able to stand-off against chips manufactured on the 20 nm, 16 nm FinFET and 14 nm FinFET processes, the lowered production cost will play nicely with smartphone manufacturers, since they can lower the overall costs of their mobile products.

Other features present in the mobile chipset is support for a 21 megapixel camera, along with the capability of recording 1080p videos at 60 FPS. In addition, a Cat 6 LTE modem will also be present to deliver superior carrier network speeds.

The first handsets running Helio are expected to arrive after Q3, 2015.