Mediatek are currently promoting their next generation MT6797 Helio 20 SoC to manufacturers revealing more details of the chipset.
Mediatek are courting Chinese phone makers in an attempt to lure them over to using the next generation Helio 20 in flagship devices rather than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810.
2015 has been a great year for Mediatek so far, with their 64bit chipsets performing well and finding their way in to Chinese and international brand phones, a trend they hope to continue with the MT6797 Helio 20.
We’ve already posted details of the Tri-Cluster, 10 core processor, but a new comparison table against the Snapdragon 810 gives us an easy reference for the full specification of the chipset.
As previously mentioned the MT6797 will run a small, medium and large core ranging from 4xA53 at 1.4Ghz to 2xA72 at 2.5Ghz for more intensive use. This new table also confirms that the MT6797 will be made on a 20nm process to create a smaller and more efficient chipset.
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The MT6797 will also support 25 mega-pixel main cameras, super slow motion video recording and Native3D 2.0 for three-dimensional stills. 4K video recording and playback will both be possible, with 4K HDR video being a new feature for the chip.
Graphics are handled by an ARM Mali T880MP4 700mHz GPU, while screen support remains at WQXGA 2560 x 1600 resolution panels.
While the MT6797 Helio 20 does look like one formidable processor the Snapdragon 810 still has a few feature highlights. Cat 9 LTE being the most important but there is also support for higher resolution screens and LPDDR4 memory.
Helio 20 MT6797 processors should start shipping to phone manufacturers in Summer with phones reaching stores with the chipset by late Autumn/Early Winter.
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I think the Helio X20 will be a little faster than the Snapdragon 810, but not significantly. Its main advantages will be efficiency and camera performance. I guess that’s what Mediatek want to focus on – and I like that. Top notch performance really isn’t what we need, especially when last generation Qualcomm chipsets still can’t be maxed out with todays applications and games.
No, it ill be a hell of a lot faster on the CPU side.
In theory A72 at 2.5GHz would be some 40% more or less faster than the Galaxy S6 and that one is plenty faster than the 810.
The SD620 with A72 at just 1.8GHz should easily beat the SD810. and more or less match the Exynos 7420.
If ARM meets it’s targets with A72.it will be pretty great.
That applies to chipsets that only use A72 cores. You forget that Mediatek does not use all those cores for a performance benefit only, but mainly due to efficiency reasons. The A72 cores won’t be used all the time. They will come to use if a complicated task needs to be done very quickly to be able to revert back to slower cores as fast as possible. By doing that you can increase energy efficiency significantly. The big.LITTLE architecture and also this new Mediatek tripple-core architecture never have been invented for a performance benefit. Energy efficiency always is priority no.1 with those. If you want to get maximum performance you would go for x cores of the same kind. That’s what Mediatek did with the MT6752 for example and it is the reason why it is so much more powerful than the Snapdragon 615.
That’s one weird way of looking at it and it’s wrong.
The small cores are used on tasks that don’t saturate them. So they don’t hit max load and they can deal with the task. There is no real loss in performance vs using the bigger core.When the small core gets a task that would saturate it so it would take longer, the load goes to the bigger ones.
Any loss in perf is mostly because of the time lost switching not because you use the small cores but ideally that would be negligible.In real life that does get a bit tricky and it’s not always handled well enough.
The goal for bigLITTLE is to save power without impacting performance not to sacrifice performance to save power.You actually can clock the big cores higher for short bursts because the small cores allow for a bit more TDP room.
BigLITTLE serves the same goal as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling where the core clocks and voltages are dialed down or up to adjust to the current need. BigLITTLE extends that and adds further power gains at a small die area cost by using cores that are best fit for the task instead of clocks that are best fit for the task.
Not to mention that SD810 also has little cores.
Now it is true that this chip has only 2 big cores but in mobile you don’t really see scenarios where 4 big cores would be pushed to high load at the same time and usually muti-core perf is TDP limited so you can’t really push 4 big cores at 100% for more than a few seconds anyway.
lol ok let me repeat what you said, just in case you decide to edit
“That applies to chipsets that only use A72 cores. You forget that
Mediatek does not use all those cores for a performance benefit only,
but mainly due to efficiency reasons. The A72 cores won’t be used all
the time. They will come to use if a complicated task needs to be done
very quickly to be able to revert back to slower cores as fast as
possible. By doing that you can increase energy efficiency
significantly. The big.LITTLE architecture and also this new Mediatek
tripple-core architecture never have been invented for a performance
benefit. Energy efficiency always is priority no.1 with those. If you
want to get maximum performance you would go for x cores of the same
kind. That’s what Mediatek did with the MT6752 for example and it is the
reason why it is so much more powerful than the Snapdragon 615.”
Now maybe you can clarify what you said.
But i did what i could to explain it in easy to understand terms so i’m done.
Oh well, is that so. Me too then. No need to edit anything. Please show me where I wrote something about a performance downgrade, because I can not find that part. Anyway, your explanation above is right, I perfectly know how those architectures are working. But again, you simply didn’t understand what I wrote, so your explanation doesn’t proof my words wrong at all and neither of our claims is wrong.
You claimed that the X20 will be “a little faster than the Snapdragon 810”, i replied that it will be a lot faster only for you to claim that “That applies to chipsets that only use A72 cores.”.
Let’s all pretend we’re computer engineers with a doctorate in microchip design and know what we’re talking about so we can look cool on the internet.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
I cant help laughing bro. What you have here is a mix of geeks, nerds and also computer engineers so yes,some people actually know what they are talking about. Not everyone here are just phone fans.
Some are more advanced than that 🙂
At least They are no hurting anyone.
Look at those who give medical advices. And there are lot of people taking those advices seriously, sometimes more than doctors.
Jesus, you really have no other problems, don’t you? 😀
So what is the definition of “faster” and a “a little faster”? Depends on the point of view obviously. So lets get things straight:
– The Snapdragon 810 is a big.LITTLE chipset with 4x A53 and 4x A57
– The MT6797 is a tripple cluster chipset with 4x A53, 4x A57 and 2x A72
– The basis of the MT6797 pretty much equals the Snapdragon 810 (except frequencies) but adds two A72 cores on top
– The A53 cores are the most power efficient cores but also the slowest. A57 is faster but needs more power. A72 is supposed to be a lot more faster but in reality probably not all that much more than A57 cores.
– The A53 cores of the MT6797 feature a lower clock speed than the ones on the Snapdragon 810. The A57 cores are similar plus the additional A72 cores result in a much higher “raw” processing power.
– Core Pilot 3.0 will manage the whole thing, making sure every core is used in the most efficient way possible which includes consideration of temperature, clock, voltage and core load while assigning tasks.
– The overall performance gain of this is about 15% going after Benchmark results (71k vs 61k in Antutu) which obviously don’t say much but are the only thing we can refer to right know.
So yes, the performance gain is there (I never denied that) but it isn’t anything groundbreaking. And I for myself never expected it to be groundbreaking, since (as I said before) big.LITTLE architectures and also Mediatek’s tri-cluster architecture (which is based on the idea behind big.LITTLE) never have been built for the sole purpose of getting the biggest performance boost possible. The main target is efficiency. Efficiency = ratio between power consumption and performance.
What I wanted to say with my claim “that applies to chipsets that only use A72 cores”: If you want to get the biggest performance gain possible, you will never go for such an architecture as a chip manufacturer since efficiency always means a certain degree of performance cut-down. The Allwinner A80T is a very good example for this. This chipset performs awful but becomes quite a power house as soon as you disable the big.LITTLE management and let the chipset do everything with its big cores and only use the little cores if the big cores are maxed out. Of course that also results in a cut-down on battery life of about 68% (personal experience on the Teclast P98 Air which I tested and developed a custom ROM for).
Essentially this discussion is pointless since we don’t need the performance a chip consisting only of A72 cores could potentially offer. Even the Snapdragon 801 as a last generation high-end chip can not be maxed out yet with normal applications / games.
Verdict: We will have some very exciting chipsets popping until 2016 and the Mediatek Helio X20 / MT6797 so far is my favorite among all of them since I believe it will be the most efficient chipset out there, and again, efficiency (in my eyes) is the most important thing right now.
I’m with you in this debate.
Just look at the amount of comments when it’s about SoCs.
I understand the passion behind it but the real deal here is power efficiency.
You can put the most powerful CPUs but we are still talking about raw power measured through benchmarks, a scenario that we won’t see in real life also because batteries won’t allow it.
Soon we might need more power and we can’t stop that process but right now the focus is efficiency until the battery technology will evolve.
Just to expand a little on what you said realjjj …
The 2x A72 cores are about as fast as 4x A57 cores anyways. According to this info from AnandTech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8957/arm-announces-cortex-a72. So, performance-wise, the SD810 is not gonna come close to the Helio x20. And I love the fact that they have gone for a good albeit not super GPU this time. But I bet the T880 can handle any games you throw at it. ALso good thing MT is not using only 2 cores again but 4 cores this time which should add a whole lot more in GFX performance too.
Theoretically, 4x T880 is about 160% faster than 2x T760.
Big litle is ARMs bullshits & worst ever waist of silicon. Not to get me wrong I am not against micro multi purpose helping – offloading cores.
Truth is a little different…
Task migration is costy process & doing it 2-3 times is something that doesn’t pay of for small fast tasks as most are on smartphones. The A72’s will have healthy advantage in performance compared to A57’s but due to 15~20% bigger clock rate with same DTP. Everyone in the industry is pursuing a performance /cost metrics & they don’t give a shit about power efficiency or green computing for that matter. For example A72 @ 1GHz will consume about same amount of power (if not even less) as A53 @ 1.5GHz will performing similar. Magical barrier for efficient performing on silicon is around 1.0~1.1GHz, after that power consumption rises almost exponentially.