Update: MediaTek has released the official spec sheet and it confirms our original story that the difference between the Helio G80 and Helio G85 is a higher clocked GPU.
MediaTek’s Helio G-series line of smartphone chipsets has gotten a new member today. The new processor which is called the Helio G85 made its debut in the Redmi Note 9. So what features does this new gaming chipset bring?
The Helio G85 processor arrives nearly three months after the Helio G80 was announced. The latter processor made its global debut in the Realme 6i smartphone.
For the 12nm Helio G85, MediaTek is sticking to a 2+6 core arrangement. So you have 2x Cortex-A75 cores clocked at 2.0GHz and 6x Cortex-A55 cores whose clockspeed is unknown. This is the same core arrangement and clockspeed as the Helio G80. So what is actually different?
The clockspeed of the GPU seems to be the only difference. Based on the official spec sheet of the Redmi Note 9, the Mali G52 MC2 of the Helio G85 is clocked at 1000MHz while the spec page for the Helio G80 says its GPU is clocked at 950MHz. So we have just an increase of 50MHz over that of the Helio G80. Pretty disappointing, right?
We reached out to MediaTek for a full spec sheet of the new chipset to see if there are more details but we haven’t gotten any response yet. If and when they do publicize a full spec sheet and we find more differences, we will let you know.
According to benchmark results displayed by Xiaomi during its product launch, the Helio G85 beats the Exynos 9611 and the Snapdragon 665 processor by no small margin.
Based on the above, the Helio G85 does bring a bump in performance compared to the Snapdragon 665 that powers the Redmi Note 8. However, there is no justification for why it exists when there is the Helio G80.
UP NEXT: MediaTek to announce new processors on May 7; Dimensity 2000 tipped to launch
