MediaTek Helio P25 Octa-Core SoC Launched for Dual-Camera Smartphones

Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek on Wednesday announced a new Helio system-on-chip (SoC) specifically targeted at dual-camera smartphones. The all-new Helio P25 is built on the 16nm process, and offers octa-core processing with the company's Imagiq, an Image Signal Processor (ISP) technology.

The company says that smartphones featuring the new MediaTek Helio P25 can be expected to be available in the market in Q1 2017. MediaTek says that the Helio P25 is an upgrade to the company's older Helio P10 and P20 SoCs, and it combines dual-camera support with power efficiency.

The MediaTek Helio P25 packs a 12-bit dual ISP which offers support for up to 24-megapixel single camera or dual 13-megapixel cameras. The company says that the Helio P25 is dual camera-optimised and comes with features like Colour, Mono de-noise, and real-time shallow DoF bokeh effect. The new chip supports video HDR with full preview and also comes with high performance auto exposure.

The Helio P25 offers up to 25 percent better power efficiency than previous versions, and MediaTek promotes to deliver more power while using less energy. On the graphics side, MediaTek Helio P25 packs the recent ARM Mali-T880 dual GPU clocked at up to 900MHz, which the company says it perfect for demanding video and gaming apps. The new chipset also supports enhanced uploads in LTE (up to 64-QAM uplink for LTE-TDD mode) and supports low power double data rate random access memory (LPDDR4x) up to 6GB.

Commenting on the announcement, Jeffrey Ju, Executive Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer at MediaTek said, "MediaTek Helio P25 paves the way for high-resolution and feature-rich smartphone cameras that enable amazing static shots, 4K and 2K videos. Supporting two cameras up to 13-megapixels each, the MediaTek Helio P25 redefines expectations for mobile photography and our multimedia features like, MediaTek MiraVision technology, continuously enhance visual user-experiences."