On the imaging front, the Helio X30 is said to offer faster image processing supporting a resolution of up to 28-Megapixel at 30fps. Hardware support for video includes video encode up to 4K at 30Hz with HEVC and VP9, 2560×600 pixel displays at a frame rate of 60Hz, and 1080p displays at a frame rate of 120Hz, the chip also comes with better audio support including a range of 120 dB SNR and -100 dB THD. On the connectivity front, the Helio P30 offers Cat 10 LTE with 3x carrier aggregation and a 2×2 802.11ac WiFi radio.
The primary changes in the Helio X30 have been the shift from A72 cores to the A73 and the A53 Cores to the A35 along with the 10nm manufacturing process. The A73 cores are expected to manage the thermal conditions in a much more efficient way and will also allow for higher clock speeds along with larger caches. All of the above should help the X30 show a drastic improvement in its performance characteristics. The A53 cores are employed to handle the low power tasks and the all the A53 cores come with a marginal difference in clock speed. On the graphics front, MediaTek has parted its way with the Mali GPU and instead has gone back to opting from Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPU series which we saw earlier in the Helio X10. In all likelihood, MediaTek is either using GT 7200 or GT 7400 GPUs which are mostly clocked at either ~105 GFLOPS or ~210 Gflops, either way it is an improvement over Mali-T880 MP4 used in its predecessor. Now the GPU part is not that impressive especially after considering the fact that the Adreno 830 in Snapdragon 820 is already better than the PowerVR, also the crippled open source support offered by PowerVR can be yet another bottleneck.
Coming to the Helio P20, MediaTek has announced that the P25 will be manufactured on the TSMC’s 16nm FFC node and will be made up of 8x A53 cores clocked at 2.3GHz and paired with a Mali-T880 MP2 GPU, up to 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM and hardware accelerated HEVC video decode support up to 4K 30 Hz and video encode at 4K 30 Hz in h.254 format. The display support would accommodate 1080p displays 60 Hz and will come equipped with a Cat 6 LTE 2x carrier aggregation alongside Dual-SIM Standby support. Although not much has been revealed it is quite possible that the Helio P25 will be a higher clocked version of the Helio P20.
