Although Qualcomm is still the largest supplier of mobile chipsets, its largest rival, MediaTek, is trying hard to shorten the distance between itself and the market leader, inching towards the maker of Snapdragon chips slowly yet steady. The Taiwan-based chip maker already has the upper hand in the entry-level market and a slight supremacy in the mid-range one, as many representatives of these segments are powered by its chips. But more prominent presence in the high-end segment is still a bit elusive for the manufacturer; however, its upcoming top-tier chipsets might make it a bit more competitive in this regard.
MediaTek recently announced its new high-end chipset family that will make the rounds this year - Helio. It consists of two sub-families, Helio X and Helio P. As we said, both are top-tier ones, though there's little to no information about the Helio P. MediaTek actually unveiled details about only one chip in particular, the Helio X10, which is a 64-bit chipset with eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 2.2GHz.
Additionally, the Helio X10 supports display refresh rates of up to 120Hz and slow-motion video recording at up to 480fps in undisclosed resolution, which sounds pretty exciting. As a refresher, the current slo-mo champions - the iPhone 6 & the 6 Plus - can record videos at 240fps.
There's no word on the specs or the features of the other chipset lineup, the Helio P, which is described as a family of "premium performance chips". We are pretty sure that MediaTek will provide more details about it as 2015 progresses. What's more, we should expect the first Helio-powered smartphones sometime in Q2 2015.
Undoubtedly, the Helio X and probably the Helio P chipset lines are aimed directly at Qualcomm and Samsung, which are the makers of some of the most powerful smartphone chipsets in the industry right now - the Snapdragon 810 is powering HTC's newest flagship, the One M9, while Samsung is setting a new bar with its 14nm FinFET Exynos 7420 chipset which is churning the gears of its Galaxy S6/S6 edge troopers.
