MediaTek Announces The Helio P22, A New Premium Mid-Range SoC

MediaTek has unveiled the Helio P22 SoC targeting the premium mid-range smartphone market. As with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 which has just been announced, the new Helio P22 brings some of the high-end SoC features to mid-tier devices at a lower price point.

The P22 is the fabricated on TSMC’s 12nm FinFET process. Interestingly, MediaTek claims this is first premium mid-range SoC manufactured on the process, but they do fail to note that Qualcomm is shipping their Snapdragon 710 on a more advanced 10nm 10LPE process. The chip itself sports eight Cortex-A53 cores operating at up to 2 GHz and supports LPDDR4X memory operating at up to 1600 MHz.

One of the more interesting changes that MediaTek has done with the P22 is with the GPU. This is the first Helio P to feature an Imagination Technologies PowerVR GPU. In the past, MediaTek has only been using Mali GPUs for this series. The P22 incorporates the PowerVR GE8320 GPU operating at up to 650 MHz.

While both MediaTek and Qualcomm market their SoCs to premium mid-range smartphones, it’s clear the two have wildly different definitions for “premium mid-range”.

The Helio P22 is already in volume production with devices based on the SoC already launching. Vivo has launched the Vivo Y83 smartphone which uses the P22 and comes with 4 GiB of ram as well as a 13-megapixel primary camera on the rear and a 8 MP front camera.