Taiwan MediaTek announced SoC “Helio P60” equipped with an AI-specific multicore arithmetic unit, Cortex-A 73 / A 55 CPU, Mali-G 72 MP3 GPU at the MWC 2018. At the same booth, a live demonstration of 5GNR-compatible 5G modem chip prototype using an early prototype was performed, and the state of 3 Gbps communication in the 3.5 GHz band was released.
Helio P60
Helio P60 has the following specifications.
| Specification of Helio P60 | |
|---|---|
| CPU | Cortex-A 73 (big, up to 2 GHz) / Cortex-A 53 (LITTLE, up to 2 GHz) |
| GPU | Mali-G72 MP3 (800 MHz) |
| Mobile APU | Multicore |
| memory | 8 GB (dual channel LPDDR 4 ×, 1,800 MHz) |
| storage | eMMC 5.1 / UFS 2.1 |
| ISP | Up to 16 + 20 MP or 32 MP |
| display | Maximum FHD + (20: 9) |
| Wi-Fi / BT | IEEE802.11ac / Bluetooth 4.2 |
| Mobile phone line | Cat. 7 (DL) /Cat. 13 (UP), DSDL |
| Manufacturing process rule | TSMC 12 nm |
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The main feature of Helio P60 is that it has SoC for the mainstream market but incorporates a multi-core AI processing unit with a performance of 280 GMAC / s, which the company calls Mobile APU (AI Processing Unit). There are examples of SoCs already equipped with accelerators compatible with AI called NPU (Neural Processing Unit) such as Huawei’s “Kirin 970”, Apple’s “A11 Bionic”, but both are for high-end.
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By using APU, it is possible to execute with lower power consumption than when computing with GPU, such as when using the AI application that performs inference processing of deep learning, and it will be able to suppress as much impact on battery driving time as possible.
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MediaTek has prepared the development environment “NeuroPilot AI Platform”, and by using it, it is possible to make software compatible with Android’s neural network API “Android NNAPI” relatively easily.Also, the baseband part of the LTE modem is built in, and it can be used in the CA configuration of category 7 for downlink and category 13 for uplink. It also supports DSDV (Dual Sim Dual VoLTE), so you can listen to the lines of two SIM cards with VoLTE enabled.
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It is manufactured with TSMC’s 12 nm process rule and will be shipped to OEMs from the beginning of the second quarter of 2018. MediaTek integrates and sells LTE modems to its SoC, and with LTE modem share, it has the second largest share of the market after Qualcomm. This time, the company demonstrated a 5 G modem compliant with “5 GNR” standardized at the end of 2017.However, at the present time, there is no actual modem chip, it is a prototype simulating the circuit with FPGA and so on.
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For this reason, it is contained in a huge box that is as large as the desktop PC, but in the future, it will be a small chip. In the demonstration at the company’s booth, it was confirmed that communication is performed at about 3 Gbps by using 8 antennas in the 3.5 GHz frequency band.
