MediaTek Helio P10 mobile chipset compared to its predecessor, also featuring eight Cortex-A53 cores and LTE Cat 6 — is a notable upgrade in terms of power efficiency, as it’ll be fabricated with a 16nm FinFET+ process instead of the old 28nm. For the same reason, the CPU has been allowed to go beyond the old 2GHz limit to 2.3GHz, and the old Mali-T860 GPU has been switched to ARM’s cream-of-the-crop Mali-T880 running at 900MHz. As a bonus, the P20 features the same Imagiq image signal processor as the flagship 10-core X20.
What’s also impressive is the fact that the P20 is the world’s first SoC known to support the upcoming LPDDR4X memory, which runs on a much lower voltage of 0.6V instead of 1.1V. That’s almost a 50 percent drop! However, judging by Samsung’s forecast back in September, we probably won’t be seeing LPDDR4X in devices until next year; which is just as well since the P20 won’t be shipping to manufacturers until the second half of this year.