MediaTek Inc., a Taiwanese fabless semiconductor company that provides system-on-chip solutions for wireless communications, has introduced MediaTek Helio P20 SoC for Smartphones at MWC 2016. The announced Helio P20 is the successor of its mid-range P10 SoC aimed at the mid-range smartphone and tablet lineups. It comes equipped with ARM's latest Mali-T880 GPU and eight Cortex-A53 cores which have been clocked at 2.3GHz. The company also unveiled the MT2511, its first bio-sensing analogue front-end chip aimed at the wearable market. The products are expected to hit the market after June 2016.
The Helio P20 SoC is a “True Octa-Core” design, rather than a big.LITTLE configuration. Helio P20 uses 8 identically-clocked ARM Cortex-A53 cores at 2.3 GHz. The previous Helio P10 used a similar CPU configuration though clocks were limited to 2.0 GHz with that SoC. Conversely, the 10-core Helio X20 uses a tri-cluster configuration, with 2x ARM Cortex-A72 cores running at 2.5 GHz, along with a typical big.LITTLE arrangement (4x Cortex-A53 cores at 2.0 Ghz and 4x Cortex-A53 cores at 1.4 GHz).
"MediaTek designed the MediaTek Helio P20 to meet today's consumer demand for sleek, powerful yet highly power efficient mobile devices," said Jeffrey Ju, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at MediaTek. "Consumers place increasing importance on the battery life and multimedia capabilities of their smartphones. MediaTek has risen to this challenge with a leading solution." Devices with MediaTek Helio P20 SoC will begin shipping in the second quarter of 2016.
The SoC maker has also unveiled the MT2511, its first "bio-sensing analogue front-end (AFE) chip" that is designed to power health and fitness devices. The company says MT2511 is "extremely" power efficient, and provides a lower active mode power consumption of less than 0.6mA when capturing PPG. The MT2511 comes equipped with MediaTek's built-in "heartbeat" interval technology and 4KB SRAM, which it says enables it to optimise overall system power consumption for sleep heart rate monitoring. The SoC also has an integrated LED boost driver for saving layout space.
"The mobile health market is one of the fastest growing technology sectors. We can only begin to imagine how health-related wearables will improve both medical care and everyday wellness all around the world," said JC Hsu, MediaTek's Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the IoT business unit. "With support for ECG and PPG and limited power needs, the fully integrated MT2511 is ideal for a variety of devices, including fitness trackers, active lifestyle smart watches and sports bands."