Ten cores in a mobile device. Yes… we better repeat it: Ten cores in a mobile device. I imagine we could ask “how”, “why”, or “does it make sense”, but manufacturers move with other ideas in mind. We don’t know if future applications will demand ten cores in a smartphone or tablet, but the folks at MediaTek already have a hardware solution with their new Helio X20 platform, which combines two different ARM architectures.
The arms race in mobile chips
Physical cores, processing threads, energy consumption, instructions per clock. These are parameters that until a few years ago were exclusive to desktop computers, but the rules have changed. Smartphones conquered the world, then tablets arrived, and now we are beginning to discover the potential of so-called phablets. Add to this the drastic increase in screen resolutions, devices that cannibalize sales, the noise of wearable accessories and the hype around smartwatches. It is becoming increasingly difficult to stand out in a chaotic market, and one of the oldest tricks in the book is the arms race. It is no longer enough to offer an appealing design and several hours of battery life. Power always attracts, and now that it can be in our pockets, the biggest players don’t stop to think twice. Today we have smartphones with eight cores inside. How does adding two more sound?
That question leads us to the doors of MediaTek, which announced its new Helio X20. The previous X10 version has eight Cortex A53 cores at 2.2 GHz, divided into two nodes of four cores each. In the case of the Helio X20, MediaTek decided to add an additional node, promising up to a 30 percent reduction in energy consumption. The lower node has four A53 cores running at 1.4 GHz, enough for the lightest tasks. In the middle we find another node identical to the lower one, but running at a higher frequency, 2 GHz to be exact. Finally, the high-performance node includes two Cortex-A72 cores at 2.5 GHz. These ten cores are accompanied by a Cortex-M4 coprocessor at 354 MHz, in charge of background tasks like MP3 playback and voice recognition optimizations.
MediaTek has also managed to integrate a Category 6 LTE modem in the Helio X20 (300 Mbps downlink and 50 Mbps uplink), a critical step to enter high-demand markets like the United States. The GPU of this new SoC is one of the Mali T800 series, guaranteeing good resolutions on screens and cameras, as well as hardware decoding for codecs like H.265. Needless to say, competition will be fierce. Qualcomm’s Snapdragons have been cutting heads, and many of their variants are already available, while the Helio X20 will not see the light until the end of the year. Still… ten cores in your smartphone. I just hope battery improvements are up to the task.
