MediaTek was highlighting features of its X20 processor as well as announcing a new P20 chip at Mobile World.
The first demonstration that we looked at was showing the X20 in an image scaling applications. The processor is able to upscale HD video, streamed at around 0.7Mbps to look equivalent to the quality of video streamed at 3.5Mbps when shown on a higher resolution display.
The second demo on the X20 was part of Mediatek’s MiraVision suite of improvements, and the demo was of a technique that uses a sensor to detect the colour of illuminating light on the surface of a display and uses this information to adjust the white point. The technique can be used to compensated for different lighting conditions, such as bright lighting, and can also be used to create “paper-like” display images.
Mediatek showed how its x20 chip and Miravision adjustment can match paper colours (left side image)
We also looked at the Mediatek Imagiq processing which uses adaptive denoising to boost the quality of images from the onboard cameras of phones using the firm’s processors.
The Helio P20 is a new SoC for smartphones that is said to improve battery life by 25% compared to the previous P10. It is made with a 16nm process and is claimed to be the world’s first SoC to support low power double data rate random access memory – LPDDR4X. The Octa-Core architecture is clocked at 2.3GHz using Arm Cortex A53 cores. The new Mali T880 clocks at 900MHz and is the fastest provided by Arm. Picture processing is at 12 bits and there is a dual phase-detection focus system for cameras. The chip can receive HD video content over LTE. The chip is expected to be in production devices in the second half of 2016.
