MediaTek announces decacore soc for smartphones and tablets

MediaTek has unveiled its X20 soc for midrange and high-end smartphones and tablets. The soc consists of three clusters with a total of ten computing cores. The three building blocks are connected with interconnects designed by MediaTek itself.

The Helio X20 or MT6797 is MediaTek’s second soc under the new Helio X naming convention: the first was the X10 or MT6795. The X20 has a striking three-cluster architecture, where most ARM big-little configurations consist of two parts. The more economical cluster consists of four Cortex A53 cores that do their work at 1.4GHz and for the average work there is a comparable cluster with four A53 cores with a higher clock speed of 2GHz. In addition, however, MediaTek adds another block with two powerful A72 cores with a clock speed of up to 2.5GHz for the heavy calculations.

MediaTek claims that the traditional big.little architectures are not sufficient enough because on the one hand they are not economical enough and on the other hand they offer too little heavy computing power. Moreover, the combination of a powerful and a frugal cluster would not be able to efficiently cope with average computing tasks, something that MediaTek’s ‘mid-cluster’ could.

The GPU of the soc is a model from the Mali T800 series, but MediaTek does not yet report details about the video chip, according to AnandTech. The X20 also contains a Cortex M4 core that can perform some tasks more economically. For example, the core takes care of audio reproduction, which should benefit the battery life when playing MP3s. The Cortex M4 can also be used for voice recognition and to improve the audio quality of speech, and it also serves as a hub for handling sensor data. The soc also supports lte cat. 6 with 2x20Mhz carrier aggregation. That makes 4G possible with a maximum of 300Mbit/s down.

The first samples of the chip will appear in the second half of 2015, and products with the Helios X20 will not appear until early 2016. The model will probably not compete with Qualcomm’s most powerful chips, but with the Snapdragon 620 that will reach the top by then. of the midrange market.