MediaTek’s 5G SoC Will Appear On Commercial Products in Q1, 2020

Many hurried to burry MediaTek, saying it has no chances against the US-based Qualcomm. But this company has been in the chip industry for a while and shouldn’t give up now. The previous announcements claim the company has the world’s first independent 5G SoC, namely the Helio M70. As for today, the Taiwanese chip maker issued another statement concerning the launch date of this chip. It turns out MediaTek will send samples of its 5G chip to major customers in the third quarter of this year. The first batch of terminals equipped with MediaTek’s 5G SoC will be available in the first quarter of next year.

First, we met the MediaTek 5G SoC at the Taipei Computer Show. The 7nm process and the built-in 5G modem make it quite competitive. The Helio M70 also integrates the ARMCortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPU, and MediaTek’s independent AI processing unit APU.

The 5G modem is integrated with the chipset. In other words, all smartphones equipped with this SoC will be able to navigate through the 5G network independently. Obviously, it also offers support for 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE networks. If believing in the words of MediaTek President, we are dealing with the most powerful 5G SoC announced to date.

The manufacturer claims the Helio M70 will reach a maximum download speed of 4.7 Gbps (on the sub-6GHz) and support New Radio (NR) 2 Component Carrier (CC). Moreover, it will offer 4K video encoding and decoding at 60FPS. It also has dynamic bandwidth switching technology that allocates 5G bandwidth required for specific applications to improve modem power efficiency by 50 percent and extend battery life.  The newer AI processing unit supports more advanced AI applications. Finally, the chipset comes ready for the high-resolution camera era, offering support for up to 80MP resolution.