Most high-end mobile chips these days have some sort of artificial intelligence-related functionality built-in but that’s really not the case with mid-range smartphones. MediaTek, a company that primarily supplies chips for budget devices, has announced a new mobile processor which brings artificial intelligence functionality to mid-range devices. MediaTek unveiled its latest mobile application processor at the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona.
The MediaTek Helio P60 chip is built on TSMC’s 12nm FF process with four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.0GHz and four A53 cores at 2.0GHz. This presents a significant improvement in performance compared to previous P-series chipsets from MediaTek. It’s a 70 percent boost alone compared to the Helio P30, according to the company.
It also features the Mali-G72 MP3 graphics processor which is claimed to be 70 percent faster than its predecessor. There’s additional hardware in the chipset for processing artificial intelligence-related tasks and it’s called the NeuroPilot core.
MediaTek’s NeuroPilot core will be responsible for handling the AI-related tasks with the standard Android Neural Networks API. The company promises “class-leading” performance but doesn’t really provide a point of reference to quantify that.
The company also says that the Helio P60 is its most efficient P-series chip as yet and that it uses 12 percent less power on average compared to the P23. The chipset can drive 1080p displays with 20:9 aspect ratio and supports UFS 2.1 memory and up to 8GB LPDDR4X RAM. MediaTek will start shipping the Helio P60 to device manufacturers in early Q2 2018.