MediaTek wants to compete in the mid-to-high-end market with Helio P60, relying not only on AI

Last year, several major mobile phone processor manufacturers in the industry played the artificial intelligence (AI) card, creating an atmosphere that there is no mobile phone without AI. In this trend, MediaTek naturally did not want to lag behind. At MWC 2018 in February, it released the Heilo P60 and officially debuted in China on March 14.

Helio P60 is MediaTek's first mid-to-high-end smartphone processor SoC with a built-in multi-core artificial intelligence processor (Mobile APU: AI Processing Unit) and NeuroPilot AI technology. It adopts a 4 x A73 + 4 x A53 "big and small core" 8-core architecture design with a maximum main frequency of 2.0GHz. Li Yanji, senior product planning director of MediaTek's wireless communication division, said that Helio P60 has a 70% performance improvement over the P23 / P30 of the same series.

Helio P60 is another mid-to-high-end mobile processor from MediaTek following Helio P10, P20, P23, and P30. However, unlike other processors in the Helio P series, Helio P60 has added APU and NeuroPilot AI technology to address the current hot AI technology.

So, what is the specific performance of this processor that MediaTek has high hopes for? The main points are as follows:

• The CPU uses four ARM Cortex-A73 large cores and four ARM Coretex A53 small cores, which are used to run high-computation tasks and light tasks respectively. The frequency of all cores is 2.0 GHz.

• GPU, using ARM's latest 3-core Mali-G72 MP3, clocked at 800 MHz;

• Low power consumption, using TSMC's 12nm FinFET process technology, using CorePilot 4.0 technology, scheduling the operation of various tasks in this big.LITTLE architecture. Compared with the previous generation of P series products, its overall performance is improved by 12%, and the power consumption when running large games is reduced by 25%, significantly extending the use time of the phone.

• The processor has three image signal processors (ISPs) built in;

• In terms of AI, it integrates a dual-core APU based on the Edge AI platform. Helio P60 is also MediaTek's first processor to use an APU. NeuroPilot's heterogeneous computing architecture can seamlessly coordinate the operation between the CPU, GPU and APU, facilitate the execution of AI applications, and maximize the performance and power consumption of mobile phones. MediaTek provides NeuroPilot software development kit (SDK) for developers;

• Supports 20:9 full screen.

Li Yanji is full of confidence in the power consumption performance of mobile phones equipped with Helio P60. He said that as the "world's first" 12nm process processor, Helio P60's power consumption performance is close to that of competing 10nm processors, and the heat generation can also be controlled at a temperature close to that of competing 10nm processors.

AI is a topic that almost all mobile processor manufacturers must face, and MediaTek is no exception. For Helio P60, the company has embedded AI capabilities for the first time, and the core of its implementation is the APU.

This is the first time that MediaTek has launched a dedicated AI chip. Its APU is based on the VPU (image processing unit) built into the Helio P30 and has been optimized through algorithms. Its NeuroPilot is also developed based on Google's Neural Network, taking an open ecological route.

The Helio P60 APU uses a dual-core architecture. Li Yanji said that the multi-core APU architecture is designed to better meet the frequent demands of smartphone users for AI applications. For example, users may need to achieve blurring while also beautifying their photos, and the dual-core APU is launched based on this scenario. Compared with the single DSP of competing products responsible for image processing, the Helio P60 has a multi-threaded APU capability, and its image processing capabilities can be doubled.

In addition, Li Yanji also said that compared with the solution of using CPU for AI computing, using APU to process AI intelligent computing can enable the processor to achieve a higher performance-power ratio.

MediaTek has also been active in building a mobile phone ecosystem with processors as the core. This time, taking the opportunity of the domestic launch of Helio P60, the company invited four partners to attend the meeting and introduced the cooperation situation to the media.

In this regard, Li Zonglin, general manager of MediaTek's wireless communications business unit, said: "Helio P60 integrates solutions from multiple artificial intelligence manufacturers such as Tencent, SenseTime, ArcSoft, and Megvii, and has achieved industry-leading levels in mobile phone security, photography, and face recognition. MediaTek will continue to work with partners to build an artificial intelligence ecosystem and create an artificial intelligence future together!"

It is reported that the cooperation between MediaTek and Tencent is mainly reflected in the latter's Tap-AI anti-virus engine and Tiantian Pitu. Based on the P60 processor, the Tap-AI engine can better use deep learning to detect new viruses and variants, while Tiantian Pitu can also achieve face recognition, facial positioning, portrait segmentation, body recognition, etc. faster.

As for SenseTime, with the support of Helio P60, SenseTime's AI face unlocking solution can complete the entire unlocking algorithm pipeline in about 100 milliseconds, and the user will not feel anything during the entire unlocking process. In addition, SenseTime's monocular blurring solution not only supports real-time segmentation and blurring preview mode of portraits in dynamic scenes, but also supports fast and accurate blurring photo mode, which can achieve clear portraits and blurred backgrounds.

In addition, ArcSoft and Megvii also demonstrated application solutions based on Helio P60.

Li Zonglin said that mobile phones equipped with Helio P60 will be launched in April this year. As for the market response, Li Zonglin said that after the launch of Helio P60, the feedback from smartphone manufacturers far exceeded MediaTek's expectations. Many smartphone manufacturers have shown great interest in Helio P60, and some manufacturers have already developed applications based on Helio P60.

In the current bloody mobile phone processor market, it can be said that no company has an easy time (except Apple and Huawei HiSilicon, whose processors are only used in their own brand mobile phones). MediaTek's performance and revenue in 2017 were not satisfactory, and its latest financial report this year was also not satisfactory. I hope that the birth of Helio P60 can inject a shot of adrenaline into it and give it a surprise in 2018.

Author/Zhang Jian

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