MediaTek 7nm 5G With Cortex-A77 CPU, Mali-G77 GPU are Ready for Cheaper Next-Gen Phones:

We’re still in the early days of 5G, but if you take a quick look around the smartphone world, it’s clear Qualcomm has gotten a head start when compared to other chipmakers. Every 5G phone on the market today is powered by a Qualcomm modem and a few smartphones of Huawei are powered by there own hisilicon chipsets. The available 5G devices are launched at premium pricing, but MediaTek is working hard for budget smartphones to ensure that budget smartphones aren't left behind. MediaTek has announced a new 5G-compatible system-on-chip that will offer decent performance and 5G connectivity to lower-end devices. The elegantly-named Integrated 5G SoC combines MediaTek's M70 5G modem.

The odd thing about today’s announcement is that this seems like a relatively early pre-announcement. MediaTek doesn’t divulge the chip itself doesn’t have an official name yet, MediaTek claims that its upcoming SoC (system-on-a-chip, AKA processor) is the “world’s first fully-integrated 7 nanometer 5G SoC” and with it, the company hopes to bring down the price of future 5G smartphones and mobile devices. That’s an enticing idea, because anyone who has taken a look at the starting price of phones, like the $1,300 Galaxy S10 5G and $1,150 LG V50 5G, knows it’s hard to ignore the hefty premium that comes with today’s 5G-ready handsets.

On top of that, MediaTek’s 5G SoC will also be the first chip to feature ARM’s recently announced Cortex-A77 CPU and Mali-G77 GPU. The Cortex -A77 is a follow up to ARM’s A76 CPU and features improved efficiency in addition to a newly redesigned architecture, and if past releases are any indication, this may be the same CPU core we see in Qualcomm’s next flagship chip later this year.

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.

We don’t know a lot more about the SoC, and exactly what product category its targeting, but we expect MediaTek to still largely target the mid-range. We should be seeing devices with the new SoC released in 2020.

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.
Stay tuned to CERadar for more such interesting updates.