MediaTek 5G SoC with Cortex-A77 Cores & Mali-G77 GPU Announced

We have seen 5G modems from all the major chip makers in 2018. While MediaTek is quite late to the 5G party, it is the first to announce a SoC with an integrated Helio M70 5G modem. The company also mentioned that its 5G SoC will also feature the Cortex-A77 cores and Mali-G77 GPU. Both these were announced just two days ago at Computex 2019. Last year, Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC is the first chipset to launch with Cortex-A76 cores and Mali-G76 GPU.

MediaTek is yet to reveal the name of this new 5G SoC. However, it has confirmed that this new SoC will be built on TSMC’s 7nm node. Apart from the latest CPU and GPU designs, it will also come with the third generation AI processing unit (APU) which uses in-house IP. Talking about the camera capabilities, the new 5G SoC will support 4K at 60fps encode/decode and 80MP super high-resolution camera. Coming to the 5G connectivity, the Helio M70 modem will support sub-6GHz spectrum .

It offers up to 4.7 Gbps download speeds and 2.5Gbps upload speeds. The Helio M70 will also be one of the first 5G modems to support up to 2x carrier aggregation that can allow it to band two 5G frequencies. It will support both non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) 5G network architectures. The MediaTek’s 5G modem still doesn’t support mmWave which is currently deployed only by the US carriers. All the major markets across the world are working on offering 5G services through the sub-6GHz spectrum.

MediaTek also mentioned that it is working with several partners including OPPO and Vivo. While the current 5G smartphones are priced at around $1000, the MediaTek 5G SoC will help the 5G smartphones reach masses. Stay tuned on Phone Radar for more details!