MediaTek Releases Helio P23 / P30 – Is it More Than a GPU Upgrade?

Yesterday, MediaTek official released two SoC named Helio P23 / P30 in the smartphone market. The two SoCs are the descendants Helio P20 / P25 and features from drastic changes in addition to all the CPUs experience a complete changeup.

MediaTek Helio P20 / P25 still uses the TSMC 16nm process. We won’t see a change this time as both SoCs have the same CPU running at the same frequency. The new series integrates eight A53 CPU cores. The A53 cores divided into two parts, the High and the Low. The high section consists of four cores running at a frequency of 2.3GHz. In comparison, its equivalent to P20 but slower than the P25’s frequency of 2.6GHz. However, the low section is improved a bit based on four cores running @ 1.65GHz. In short, we may see the change in the name of both SoC but the CPU is entirely same. MediaTek has given the new generation an energy-efficient approach as a budget-friendly SoC should be. Still, they should have made Helio P30 better than P23 regarding CPU performance.

A drastic improvement can be seen in the GPU section. MediaTek first time uses a new generation of ARM Mali-G71. An MP2 dual-core configuration with a frequency of 770MHz for P23 and 950MHz for P30. Considering the previous GPU Mali-T880MP2, it’s a tremendous leap.

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Other specs include:

• Single-channel 32-bit LPDDR3-933 and dual-channel 16-bit LPDDR4X-1600 support for P23. Meanwhile, P30 only supports the new LPDDR4.
• A new Vision Processing Unit, which is a 500MHz frequency Tesilica DSP, supports 4K / 30fps H.264 / H.265 format decoding, encoding, but P23 cut off the 4K H.265 encoding features.
• P23 supports a single 24MP camera or a 13MP dual camera. Meanwhile, P30 supports a single 25MP camera or a 16MP dual camera.
• Baseband support LTE Cat.7 / 13, the largest download and upload speed of 300Mbps and 150Mbps respectively. Both support dual card dual standby, dual VoLTE.

MediaTek Helio P23 / P30 – Price & Availability

Smartphone featuring the new Helio P series will release in the fourth quadrant of 2017. P23 will be integrated into smartphones, globally. Meanwhile, P30 will be limited to Chinese smartphones.

The pricing hasn’t released yet but we expect not that much difference between the price. P23 may start will $13 and P30 for $15. The manufacturer will keep the price lower to compete with Qualcomm latest SoCs.