Mediatek is set to announce two new processors on its upcoming Beijing conference. The Taiwanese semiconductor company already started sending out invites for its August 29 event, which will introduce the much-hyped Helio P30 and Helio P23 processors.
New processor's price, specifications and features
According to GSM Arena, the Helio P23 will be built on 16nm process which will eye an octa-core PowerVR 7XTP central processing unit. The middle range System-on-Chip is said to feature dual camera setup, LPDDR4X memory, Cat. 7 connectivity and will support 2K resolution.
The Helio P30, on the other hand, will likely use Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s 12nm process and will feature quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 at 1.5GHZ plus quad-core ARM Cortex-A72 at 1.5GHz. In addition, instead of using Cat. 7 for P30, the most powerful SoC in P series will adopt Cat. 10 connectivity that will deliver downloading speeds of up to 600 Mbps.
According to a Weibo post, it is expected that MediaTek will ship 3 million of both chips per month, which is expected to be adopted by Chinese smartphone manufacturers by the end of the year. Some of the expected manufacturers to adopt Helio P23 and P30 on their mid-range and high-range smartphones were Xiaomi, Vivo, Meizu, Gionee and OPPO.
Meanwhile, prior sending invites to some industry experts, it was rumored that MediaTek is likely to reduce the price for its P23 SoC to win over Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 450, which will feature 14nm process. Snapdragon 450, which will be manufactured by Samsung for Qualcomm, has already undergone price cut to $10.50 just to win clients, and MediaTek is said to be under pressure on doing the same thing for its upcoming mid-range SoC.
According to DigiTimes, though it isn’t easy for the Taiwan semiconductor company to lower P23’s price, which was originally set to be priced at $15, MediaTek will try to sell the chips for as low as $10 just to compete with Qualcomm.
Top 3 IC design house worldwide for Q2 2017
For the second quarter of the year, NVIDIA, Broadcom Limited and Qualcomm topped the latest TrendForce’s revenue ranking.
Broadcom Limited took the first rank, while Qualcomm and NVIDIA took the second and third place, respectively. MediaTek was dethroned by NVIDIA which was holding the 3rd spot for a long period of time.
One reason why MediaTek’s spot was overtaken by NVIDIA was because of its unsuccessful product strategy. According to CTimes, the not-so-successful product strategy of MediaTek affected its capabilities in competing in the “smartphone market industry,” thus leading to falling behind in overall revenue performance.
