MediaTek unveils 10nm, deca-core Helio X30

Steadily establishing itself as the Pepsi to Qualcomm’s Coke, MediaTek recently unveiled the an SoC that may even be able to stand up to the top-shelf offering from its rival’s Snapdragon line.

The deca-core MediaTek Helio X30 isn’t expected to arrive in mobile devices until sometime next year, but at least the we finally have official confirmation from the fabless semiconductor manufacturing firm. Evolved from last year’s Helio X20 and the turbo-tuned X25, the Helio X30 steps up from the 20nm manufacturing process employed by its predecessors and graduates to Taiwan Semiconductor Corp’s 10nm format.

MediaTek has also revised its process architecture for the X30. Unlike its predecessors, which used a combination of only A72 and A53 core, the X30 leverage ARM’s power-sipping A35 cores for even more efficient battery usage.

The X30 will have two Cortex-A73 cores, reportedly clocked at 2.8 GHz, to bull through the most demanding of task. It’ll also have four Cortex-A53 cores, possibly clocked at 2.2 GHz, and four economy Cortex-A35 cores that will run at 2.0 GHz. The SoC will support cameras sensors of up to 40 MP with video capture capped at 24 fps video. The X30 will also support 16MP camera at up to 60 fps video and 8MP shooters at up to 120 fps.

The upcoming SoC will support up to 8GB of RAM, split between two LPDDR4 POP 1600MHz channels. For graphics processing, it’ll come bundled with a quad-core PowerVR 7XT. Earlier reports indicated that it’d employ an ARM Mali GPU, but it looks like MediaTek wants to get ready for Daydream.

What do you think of the chip, based on what we know so far? Share your thoughts down in the comments.