MediaTek has announced the Helio P90 (MT6779V) chipset through a launch event in Beijing, China. It is a 12nm SoC that comes with better CPU and GPU than the Helio P70 that was made official in the recent past. It has been designed to offer flagship performance in mid-range devices. The biggest improvement that has arrived on the Helio P90 is in the artificial intelligence department. Compared to Helio P70 and Helio P60 chipsets, the Helio P90 can deliver four times better AI performance.
The 12nm MediaTek Helio P90 is an octa-core processor. It includes a pair of ARM Cortex A75 CPUs that work at 2.2 GHz and six ARM Cortex A55 CPUs that function at 2.0 GHz. It relies on PowerVR GM 9946 GPU for graphics.
The Helio P90 powered devices can support up to 8 GB of LPDDRX RAM and UFS 2.1 storage. Phones featuring it can support 48-megapixel camera or 24-megapixel + 16-megapixel dual camera setup. It supports a maximum display resolution of 2520 x 1080 pixels (full HD+) with an aspect ratio of 21:9.
MediaTek has included APU 2.0 inside the Helio P90 for handling AI tasks. The AI Fusion architecture can intelligently allocate AI tasks to the APU AI Accelerator or to the triple Image Processing Unit (IPU) which allows the phones fueled by Helio P90 to outperform other phones in the mid-range category.
The APU can recognize the type of content that is being displayed on the screen such as movies, sports or games and optimize the display performance accordingly. The APU also brings real-time AI driven stabilization in a video call. The benchmark tests carried out by the company revealed that the AI performance of the Helio P90 is better than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 and slightly lower than the newer 7nm Snapdragon 855 mobile platform.
The connectivity features supported by Helio P90 include Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 5.0, GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo and FM Radio. It carries support for 4G Cat. 12 / 13 LTE modem, dual 4G VoLTE, ViLTE, 4×4 MIMO and 3CA.
At the launch event, MediaTek confirmed that the Helio P90 chipset is already reached devices makers and the first devices running on it are likely to hit the market in Q1 2019. Taiwan-based MediaTek is not a known brand in Western market, but many of the Asian smartphone makers have been using it to power low-priced Android handsets. The Helio P70 powers the Realme U1 smartphone and Helio P60 is present under the hood of OPPO F9, OPPO R15, Nokia 5.1 Plus, Realme 1, Vivo X21i and so on.
