MediaTek Helio P70 chipset promises fluid gaming, fast LTE, and AI smarts

By Joe Maring
last updated

MediaTek chip
MediaTek chip (Image credit: MediaTek)

Although it may not be as popular as Qualcomm here in the States, MediaTek is still one of the biggest names when it comes to mobile processors. The company just announced its latest chipset for smartphones, and it's the MediaTek Helio P70.

The Helio P70 is the successor to the P60 from earlier this year and offers upgrades to both the CPU and GPU.

On the technical side of things, the Helio P70 uses an octa-core system with four ARM Cortex A73 processors clocked at 2.1GHz. Along with that, there are another four Cortex A53 chips @ 2.0GHz. On the graphical side of things, we're looking at a Mali-G72 MP3 system that can be used up to 900MHz (a performance boost of 13% compared to the Helio P60).

Gaming is often one of the most demanding tasks for any smartphone, and to make sure your experience here is as smooth as can be, the Helio P70 is optimized to reduce frame-rate jitters and improve gameplay latency for in-game touch controls.

MediaTek is also promoting LTE speeds up to 300Mbs, an "enhanced AI engine" that offers a 10 - 30% processing speed increase, improved video call quality even with limited bandwidth, and a host of camera features including real-time beautification, scene detection, and augmented reality.

The MediaTek Helio P70 is already is "volume production", meaning we should see smartphones powered by the new chip as early as this November.

Joe Maring
Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.

6 Comments
  • A lot of people unfairly malign Mediatek equipped phones but at the end of the day, they're always cheaper than the equivalent performing Qualcomm. Not everyone wants, needs or can afford an SD845 device.
  • I'd like to see a few more articles about MediaTek chips. They are becoming increasingly visible in the low and mid range but I've always avoided them because I know nothing about them. I could do the research myself but I'm sorta lazy and would like for someone to put it on a bumper sticker for me.
  • They're fairly solid SoCs and perform well for the price points they're sold at. The strengths Qualcomm has is that their Adreno GPU and LTE modems are better. Case in point my Sony XA1 Ultra has a Mediatek Helio P20 (4x 2.3GHz A53 & 4x 1.6GHz A53) paired with a Mali T880-MP2 which is broadly equivalent to my Lenovo tablet with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 (8x 2.0GHz A53) with an Adreno 506. The P20 seems to perform slightly better overall with general usage, despite the slightly lower overall clock speed, but the SD625 has marginally better graphics performance. The P20 also seems to run cooler which is surprising considering the smaller form factor compared to the tablet but could be due to the 4 lower speed cores on the P20. In fact it barely heats up at all even during extended use. I think the faster Qualcomm modems might be a bit of a false economy. Barely anyone will have unlimited usage LTE so what would be the point of extreme speeds when they're just not necessary? Mediatek SoC devices are generally priced lower than their Qualcomm equivalents and for that you get a little bit less "stuff" but a good value overall package. In essence, you really do get what you pay for.
  • Thanks for the info. All good to know stuff.
  • I would like to see Google invest heavily in MediaTek. It would be great to have at least two big fish in the market. Their chips are solid performers. I know they work together on AI and some other things, but would be great if Google were to release a 'entry' level Pixel at say $500 and use a MediaTek chip.
  • Little brother P60 seemed to be "good enough", so P70 would be "jolly fine", but they can't run HDR+ (Pixel) camera, right?