MediaTek's new processors: gaming power in the entry level segment

MediaTek has always strived to stay competitive by releasing powerful processors at more affordable price points. Thus, you can very often find one of these “affordable flagship killers” to be powered by an MT silicon on the inside. Today, the company has announced two new processors, aimed at the gaming niche of the mobile market.

The Helio G70 and Helio G80 are slightly downgraded versions of the 2019 Helio G90. They still have the gaming-oriented features, like HyperEngine, which ensures rapid switching between Wi-Fi and LTE to prevent lag spikes or disconnects; Rapid Response Engine, which works to reduce input lag; as well as internal CPU, GPU and RAM management to improve game performance.

Still, some corners are cut. The chipsets are made on a 12 nm process and only support a maximum of 8 GB of RAM operating at a frequency of 1,800 MHz. They are octa-core processors with two 2 GHz Cortex-A75 cores meant to do the heavy lifting and six Cortex-A55 cores that come on for light and energy-efficient tasks. They don't support 4K video recording (the top-line Helio G90 does) and can only go up to a 1080 x 2520 pixel resolution.



That said, we expect any smartphone rocking one of these new chips to be quite affordable. The Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro is equipped with the top-line Helio G90T and can be bought for about $250 from various retailers around the world — it's quite a decent phone for the money. We would imagine that a handset rocking the G70 or G80 silicon would go down to sub-$200 prices while still giving you an above-average performance.