MediaTek Helio P60 Unveiled With Focus on Battery Life and Artificial Intelligence

MediaTek has unveiled its latest system on chip, the Helio P60 at ongoing Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The octa-core Helio P60 chipset includes four ARM Cortex A53 and four ARM Cortex A73 cores all of which are clocked at 2GHz. Based on big.LITTLE architecture, the tasks that require more power use the A73 cores, while those who don’t use A53 cores to preserve battery. The P60 built on TMSC’s 12nm FinFET process delivers incredible energy efficiency, making it MediaTek’s most power efficient Helio P series SoC yet. In comparison to the previous gen Helio P series, Helio P23, the MediaTek Helio P60 offers up to 12% efficiency overall, and up to 25% efficiency in highly demanding games.

The chipset also boasts a new Mali-G72 MP3 GPU whose maximum clock speed is 800MHz. On the whole, MediaTek promises a 70% boost in both CPU and GPU performance.

Like other manufacturers, MediaTek has included a dedicated AI processing unit or APU to handle AI related tasks. The Helio P60 brings MediaTek’s NeuroPilot technology which provides superb power efficiency and has a processing performance of 280GMAC/s.

MediaTek’s NeuroPilot AI architecture brings features like facial detection, object and scene identification, real-time beautification to the chipset, and it’s compatible with Google’s Android Neural Network with support for TensorFlow, TF Lite, Caffe and Caffe 2.

The chipset comes with some significant photography improvements as well. The Helio P60 comes with three ISPs which allow 18 percent reduction in power consumption over previous generations. This means you should walk away with more photos before having to recharge your phone.

The chip supports dual camera setup of up to 20MP + 16MP or a whopping 32MP single camera sensor. A single 16MP sensor can also record video at 90fps, meaning you’ll be able to record 4K video on a device with a medium range processor. The new chip also is able to auto-detect, display and record HDR images in real-time allowing the user to see what the picture will look like even before taking the shot.

The Helio P60 is aimed at mid-range smartphones, and MediaTek said first devices to be powered it will arrive in global markets in early Q2 2018.