Mobile phone chipset maker MediaTek has announced the all-new Helio P70 system-on-chip (SoC) with enhanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine designed to power full-featured smartphones at affordable price points. Unlike this year’s Kirin, Snapdragon and Apple A-series chipsets, the P70 is built on a 12nm process, and not on 7nm process, which improves power efficiency and performance significantly.

The Helio P70 chipset comes with CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) upgrades for more powerful AI processing, and also brings upgraded imaging and camera support, a gaming performance boost and advanced connectivity features, MediaTek said in a statement.

Built with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s (TSM) 12nm FinFET technology, the Helio P70 features a multi-core APU operating at up to 525 MHz (megahertz) for fast and efficient edge-AI processing. The chipset packs four Arm Cortex-A73 2.1 GHz (gigahertz) processors and four Arm Cortex-A53 2.0 GHz processors in an octa-core big.LITTLE configuration.

For an additional power boost, the chipset has an improved Arm Mali-G72 MP3 GPU operating at up to 900 MHz, which provides a 13 percent performance improvement compared to the Helio P60, MediaTek said.

Helio P70’s enhanced AI engine delivers a 10 to 30 percent AI processing boost compared to the Helio P60, the company added.

The chipset is built on MediaTek’s NeuroPilot platform, the company’s hardware and software ecosystem to support edge-AI. NeuroPilot supports common AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, TF Lite, Caffe, Caffe2 and custom third party offerings. Helio P70 comes with a 4G LTE modem and 300MBit/s (megabit per second) of download performance.

With an enhanced AI engine that works seamlessly across the CPU and GPU, Helio P70 delivers much faster performance for AI applications and is still highly power efficient,” said TL Lee, General Manager of MediaTek’s Wireless Communication business unit.

“The introduction of Helio P70 continues MediaTek’s commitment to deliver high-end smartphone features and advanced technology for the mass market,” Lee said.

The introduction of the Helio P70 follows the launch of the Helio P60 earlier this year, and builds on its hallmark features to power the full-featured smartphones.