MediaTek announces Helio P70: It's a slightly better Helio P60, really

MediaTek’s Helio P60 might be the surprise chipset of 2018, bringing a capable octa-core CPU arrangement and AI silicon to mid-range smartphones. Now, the Taiwanese firm has followed up with the Helio P70.

The chipset is largely identical to the P60, packing the same CPU layout, GPU, and APU. Nevertheless, we do see clock speed improvements here, with the heavyweight Cortex-A73 core getting a 100Mhz bump to 2.1Ghz (the A53 cores see the same clock speed as before). The Mali-G72 MP3 GPU also sees a bump from 800Mhz to 900Mhz.

Read: We all have different smartphone preferences, but battery life unites us

In other words, the core spec improvements make the chipset sound like a Helio P61 rather than a P70. But MediaTek is claiming up to 13 percent better performance, along with reduced touch latency and improved gaming performance. The P70 also boasts 30 percent better AI performance, according to the company.

This AI boost enables related features like “real-time human pose recognition” and AI-based video encoding for Skype/Facebook video calls and YouTube live streams.

The Helio P70 maintains the P60’s triple image signal processor too, offering support for 24MP+16MP dual cameras or a 32MP single shooter. But MediaTek has added raw HDR capture, a new depth engine that delivers a 3x boost to depth mapping, and an “anti-blooming engine” to prevent white-out.

More of an incremental update?

Otherwise, the new chipset shares plenty in common with the older one. That means Cat-7/Cat-13 cellular speeds, Bluetooth 4.2 (no BT 5.0 here), display support topping out at 2,400 x 1,080, and the same 12nm manufacturing process.

All in all, it certainly seems like a minor refresh rather than anything substantially different. In fact, it seems like a  similar approach to the one Qualcomm took with the Snapdragon 821, which was an incremental upgrade over the Snapdragon 820.

MediaTek told Android Authority that, while the P70 is a “slightly more premium” chipset, they expect to see both the new chip and P60 used in phones in the coming months.

Waiting for a more powerful processor from the company? MediaTek confirmed that an “even more advanced chipset” will launch before the end of the year. Hopefully the firm moves to Arm‘s latest CPU cores with this new processor.

The Helio P70 is in production right now and will be available in smartphones from next month.

Up next: Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon 675, yet another mid-range chipset