Helio P 22A: Powered by MediaTek
MediaTek Powering 1.5 Billion devices. There is something great going. One of them is Helio P 22
“The Helio A Series continues our vision of a mobile marketplace that is accessible to everyone, where high-end features are not limited to high-end devices.
“As we’ve seen, mid-market growth continues to explode and there continues to be consumer interest in powerful and quality devices that offer them the best value,” TL Lee, General Manager, MediaTek’s Wireless Communication Business Unit, said in a statement.
With powerful quad-core performance, incredible camera features, AI enhancements and remarkable power efficiency, the “Helio A” series is optimised for devices that offer value without sacrificing modern capabilities and features.
As for cellular networking performance, the A22 will support LTE Category 7 downloads and Category 13 uploads, allowing for download rates upwards of 300Mbps and upload rates of 150Mbps. And as one might expect for an entry-level SoC, the A22 is a dual-SIM product, supporting VoLTE on both networks. This has been a recurring feature push by MediaTek as they believe the second SIM should offer feature parity with the primary SIM, especially as some of the expanding markets they’re now going after were built for LTE from the start, meaning that those markets have limited 3G/2G connectivity.
And while it doesn’t get a separate product number, MediaTek will be offering a second, cheaper version of the A22 SoC with more limited LTE Category 4 support. As one might expect, the Cat 4 model is for cost reasons; besides being a cheaper chip, Cat 4 doesn’t require carrier aggregation like Cat 7 does, allowing for simpler radios that don’t need to be able to tune and bond multiple bands at once, ultimately resulting in cheaper phones.
Finally, expect to see MediaTek and its OEM customers throwing AI around a lot, as AI functionality continues to be a buzzword in the market. In the case of the A22 the SoC does not have any dedicated neural networking hardware — there isn’t an NPU here like in the P60 — so those are executed on the GPU and the CPU as necessary. MediaTek is however providing the necessary drivers to and infrastructure to support Android’s NNAPI, so programs built against the API will be able to use the GPU (relatively) transparently, and this is where MediaTek’s claims for AI support come from.
Wrapping things up, the Helio A22 SoC is already shipping today; and indeed phones based on the SoC are already shipping as well. Xiaomi’s Redmi 6A is already out in China, with additional phones to follow. The 6A is, in turn, running for around $110 USD, which should give you a solid idea of the market segment MediaTek is chasing with the A22.
Expanding its Helio family of power-efficient chipsets, mobile phone chipset maker MediaTek on Tuesday unveiled its “Helio A” series with the new “Helio A22” system-on-chip (SoC).
Great Chip, this chip changes everything.
