MediaTek's octa-core mobile chip focuses on efficiency

Back in June, MediaTek announced its Helio P10 mobile chipset to offer octa-core

processing and faster LTE to the masses; and today, we know that it'll finally be getting

into consumers' hands by way of the Sony Xperia XA. So what's next?

The Helio P20, of course. Compared to its predecessor, this new chip 

also featuring eight Cortex-A53 cores and

LTE Cat 6 -- is a notable upgrade in terms of power efficiency, as it'll be fabricated with a 16nm FinFET+ process instead of the old 28nm. For the same reason, the CPU has been allowed to go beyond the old 2GHz limit to 2.3GHz, and the old Mali-T860 GPU has been switched to ARM's cream-of-the-crop Mali-T880 running at 900MHz. As a bonus, the P20 features the same Imagiq image signal processor as the flagship 10-core X20.

What's also impressive is the fact that the P20 is the world's first SoC known to support the upcoming LPDDR4X memory, which runs on a much lower voltage of 0.6V instead of 1.1V. That's almost a 50 percent drop! However, judging by Samsung's forecast back in September, we probably won't be seeing LPDDR4X in devices until next year; which is just as well since the P20 won't be shipping to manufacturers until the second half of this year.