Mediatek officially announces Helio X30 SoC availability

Bringing deca-core at 10nm

While Mediatek already talked a lot about its 10nm deca-core Helio X30 SoC back in August last year, it has now officially announced its availability at the Mobile World Congress 2017 currently held in Barcelona.

As you already know, the new Mediatek Helio X30 SoC has a similar design as the Helio X20 SoC, featuring a so-called Tri-Cluster 10-core design. Based on 10nm manufacturing process, the Helio X30 SoC will feature two high-power Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.5GHz, four mid-power Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and two low-power Cortex-A35 cores clocked at 1.9GHz.

This is a significant change compared to the Helio X20 SoC as this is the first time we see both the high-power Cortex-A73 cores as well as new efficient Cortex-A35 cores. The ARM Mali-T880MP4 GPU from the Helio X20 was replaced with the new PowerVR Series7XT Plus GPU (PowerVR 7XTP-MT4) clocked at 800MHz. It also has support for up to 8GB of LPDDR4x 1866MHz RAM.

The new Helio X30 SoC also brings new LTE Cat.10 modem with three downlink and two uplink Carrier Aggregation for 450Mbps download and 150Mbps upload, support for UFS 2.1 storage, new 14-bit Image Signal Processor ISP with Imagiq 2.0 which can support two 16-megapixel cameras, new Vision Processing Unit (VPU) made by Tensilica and more.

In addition to the Helio X30, Mediatek announced the new CorePilot 4.0, which should handle CPU frequency and task scheduling and comes specially optimized for Tri-Cluster design. The CorePilot 4.0 adjusts CPU frequencies by monitoring temperature and uses task scheduler to move tasks between specific clusters, depending on the performance. According to Mediatek, CorePilot 4.0 should provide best possible performance at lowest power levels.

According to Mediatek, the new Helio X30 SoC should provide 35 percent higher performance and 50 percent lower power consumption compared to its predecessor, the Helio X20 SoC.

We already wrote that Mediatek’s 10nm Helio X30 suffers from low demand as it faces big competition from the Snapdragon 835 SoC and the fact that some of its big Chinese customers, including Xiaomi and Huawei have their won SoCs, which puts Mediatek in a rather bad position.

At the presentation at MWC 2017, Executive Vice President & Co-COO, Jeffrey Ju, noted that the low yield-rate for TSMC’s 10nm process has further delayed the availability and that the company expects a limited number of phones to use the new SoC, at least for now. The Helio X30 is currently in mass production and should debut in first smartphones sometime in Q2 2017.