It’s the first chipset from the company that has an APU

It’s fast becoming clear that this year’s big smartphone trend is AI, with flagship offerings from Huawei, Samsung, LG and other companies touting AI capabilities. Taiwanese chip designer MediaTek has released a new chipset that delivers AI smarts to phones at the entry-level and mid-range price points.

Their new Helio P60 processor is an octa-core SoC that has four ARM Cortex-A73 2.0GHz processors and four ARM Cortex-A53 2.0GHz processors in big.LITTLE configuration. The new chipset is built on TSMC’s 12nm process, and boasts 70 percent CPU performance boost versus the P23 and the P30, as well as a 70 percent GPU performance enhancement vs the same.

The star of the show is MediaTek’s NeuroPilot AI technology, which delivers double the power of a GPU solution. MediaTek’s NeuroPilot SDK in P60 is compatible with Google Android Neural Networks API (Android NNAPI), and also supports common AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, TF Lite, Caffe, and Caffe2. That makes it easy for developers to quickly bring-to-market innovative AI applications. As a partner of the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), MediaTek is working on bringing ONNX support to the chipset in Q2 2018 to provide developers with even more flexibility for designing AI-powered applications.

By combining the Helio P60’s incredible camera technology with its powerful Mobile APU, users can enjoy AI-infused experiences in apps with real-time beautification, novel, real-time overlays, AR/MR acceleration, enhancements to photography, real-time video previews and more.

Smartphones powered by the MediaTek Helio P60 chipset will be available globally starting in early Q2 2018.