MediaTek’s Helio X30 to hit smartphones by Q2 2017

AT this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, MediaTek officially announced commercial availability of its Helio X30 10-core chip for smartphones, just after the Helio X20 and X25 of yesteryear.

While those latter two chips didn’t exactly rake up market fanfare, MediaTek has decided that it’s not giving up. The Helio X30, announced back in September, is now entering mass production, with the first devices to arrive some time in the 2017’s second quarter.

Like its predecessor, the Helio X30 features a tri-cluster CPU design with two Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.5 GHz to form the high-performance cluster, partnered with by four Cortex A53 cores at 2.2 GHz and four Cortex A53 at 1.9 GHz. For those not really familiar with the system-on-a-chip, the X30 counts as MediaTek’s first foray in 10-nanometer fabrication, which puts its in parallel ranking with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and Samsung’s Exynos 9 Series 8895, at least in terms of semiconductor fabrication.

Apart from its stellar collection of cores, the Helio X30 also has a 800 MHz PowerVR Series7XT Plus GPU, which is purportedly more than twice as powerful as the 780MHz Mali-T880 MP4 GPU found on the X20.

In terms of radio, the X30 features a CAT 10 LTE world mode modem, which means it can handle 450 Mbps downlink via tri-band carrier aggregation without a snag on top of 150 Mbps uplink via dual-band.

This, of course, sounds less attractive than Qualcomm and Samsung’s Gigabit-boasting chips, but then again, we haven’t reached that point in mobile network connectivity yet, so no matter.

The company says that the X30 is 35 per cent more powerful as its predecessor, while also offering better battery consumption of up to 50 per cent because of its more advanced fabrication process. That, however, remains to be seen.

The X30 supports displays with up to 2,560 x 1,600 in resolution, up to 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM, and eMMC 5.1 or UFS 2.1 flash memory. Another thing that the SoC boasts is a vision processing unit, which lets it use 10 per cent less power for processing images compared with traditional CPUs. It also supports up to 28-megapixel cameras, dual 16-megapixel cameras, and ultra-fast autofocus alongside smooth videos thanks to its improved electronic image stabilisation.