MediaTek Helio G85 Wants To Bring A 1GHz GPU To Mid-Range Phones

Qualcomm has more or less cornered the premium smartphone segment with its Snapdragon 800 series of chips. But with the Snapdragon 765, it is going after the lower tiers by promising not only performance but also 5G in a single package. It's no surprise, then, that MediaTek, its competitor in those markets, is ramping up its efforts to make up for lost time. Its new Helio G85 chipset may not boast of any 5G connectivity but it is, instead, aiming for smartphones designed for gaming for the masses.

MediaTek created its Helio G family of processors with an eye on gaming, hence the letter, and, like the Snapdragon of old, it has a line for each of the three smartphone tiers. This new Helio G85 aims for the mid-tier, promising to bring gaming performance to what some would consider cheap and incapable smartphones.

That gaming prowess is being attributed to the ARM Mali-G52, a GPU that can reach a peak of 1 GHz. Of course, that means it isn't its average running speed and it is up to MediaTek's "HyperEngine Game Technology" to boost that up as needed.

That, however, is the part that got MediaTek into trouble of late, when it was called out for benchmark cheating. While there is nothing wrong with pulling out all the stops when playing games, some consider it rather unsavory to do so when running benchmarking tests.

In addition to the Mali-G52 GPU, the Helio G80 also boasts of an octa-core CPU, but one that's made up of only two high-performance Cortex-A75 cores while the rest are "power-efficient" Cortex-A55. The chip's mid-range nature shows in its support for only up to 48 megapixel cameras and dual 4G SIM at most.