The Snapdragon 855 is out and rolling for manufacturers to grab and work on. The SoC is expected to shape up the modern generation of smartphones in 2019. MediaTek on the other hand recently announced their own successor to their Helio lineup, the P90. With the premium market space cornered by Qualcomm, the company made efforts to bring the latest technologies to budget smartphones providing a much better overall experience.
The Helio P90 consists of an octa-core CPU Cortex processor paired with the IMG PowerVR GM 9446 GPU. It seems that the company isn’t focussing on 5G anytime soon but aims at improving the mid-range smartphone market by bringing features from this year’s flagships to more accessible prices. The SoC completely supports the top of the line 4G LTE capabilities and would support the dual SIM feature. One thing of notice here is that the Helio P90 is based on the older 12nm architecture which means that the power efficiency will not be as good as the latest Snapdragon chip or the latest Apple chips.
It seems that MediaTek has invested a lot more on AI technology and the Helio P90 definitely packs a punch when it comes to AI. The P90 cleverly takes complete advantage of multiple camera sensors and processes the best possible image given extreme conditions. The APU 2.0 delivers 4.6 times the performance than the previous P60 and P70 processors which is quite significant. Overall the AI definitely is the selling point of the SoC and stacks up pretty well compared to its competition.
MediaTek has gained a reasonable amount of market in the Asian region among manufacturers like Oppo, Vivo & Nokia. With the launch of the new Helio P90, we expect MediaTek to get recognized by more than a few manufacturers especially outside Asia. The chip is expected to make its way into the mainstream market in the first quarter of 2019.
