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MediaTek at Mobile World Congress has just announced its newest system-on-chip that is destined to be in the mid-range segment of smartphones, the Helio P60. With this chipset, the company is looking to target the “new premium” smartphones. Those are defined as those that are priced between $200 and $400, but have most of the flagship specs and features of something that would cost about twice that. The Helio P60 is an octa-core chipset, with a quad-core A73 cluster clocked at 2GHz, and a quad-core A53 cluster clocked at 2GHz and there is also the Mali G72 MP3 GPU included, which is the newest GPU from ARM.
This chipset also has an AI Processing Unit or an APU. That is a feature that is becoming increasingly popular in newer chipsets, with artificial intelligence becoming such a big deal these days. It uses MediaTek’s NeuroPilot technology, which is able to do things like facial recognition, object and scene recognition, and other augmentations. NeuroPilot does also work with the Android Neural Network (Android NN), as well as other AI frameworks like TensorFlow, TF life, Caffe and Caffe 2. By supporting these AI frameworks, developers are able to quickly bring artificial intelligence applications to market on this chipset.
Besides artificial intelligence, another big aspect of many newer chipsets is what it can do for the camera on the smartphone. Since the ISP or Image Signal Processor is built into the chipset. And the Helio P60 is no different. MediaTek has made the Helio P60 capable of handling dual-cameras of 20-megapixel and 16-megapixel or a single camera that is up to 32-megapixels. The ISP inside the Helio P60 also has hardware-driven enhancements, which make it easier to gorgeous photos, and also includes real-time bokeh effects, anti-bloom, noise reduction and AI-accelerated face and scene detection. MediaTek also touts that the three ISP’s available in the Helio P60 are distinctly different, but also notes that it consumes about 18% less power, so that you can use the camera more without it depleting your smartphone’s battery. This is important since the camera usually uses the most juice, besides the display, due to all of the resources it is using.
Now getting into more of the technical aspects of this new chipset, the MediaTek CorePilot technology is also included here. CorePilot is able to assign workloads to cores, making for a seamless user experience, while also saving some power on your device. MediaTek says that compared to the Helio P23, the Helio P60 is able to deliver 25 percent power savings for power-intensive applications. And a 12 percent power savings overall. MediaTek has been working on CorePilot technology for many years, but now feel that it is ready for primetime, and is now included in the Helio P60. As mentioned already, the Helio P60 has four Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores all clocked at 2.0GHz, along with the Mali G72 graphics processing unit. The Helio P60 is also able to support displays up to a 20:9 aspect ratio at full HD plus resolution. It does also support WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, as well as Bluetooth 4.2 and GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo for location tracking. There’s support for Cat 7 download speeds and Cat 13 upload speeds, and finally, it is built on the TSMC 12nm fabrication process.
MediaTek says that it expects to see devices with the Helio P60 on the market, as early as the second quarter of this year. It has already been sampling the new processor to some of its partners. And while MediaTek would not state any names, it’s quite confident that there will be plenty of Helio P60-powered devices hitting the market in the near future.