MediaTek Helio X30

What makes you say that?

 

Official specs, including a 4-USC PowerVR Series7XTP: https://www.mediatek.com/products/smartphones/mediatek-helio-x30

 

If that number of phones sells well maybe is not that bad. But Qualcomm is getting a lot of the mid-high end phones from China.

 

Xiaomi's Surge S1 is a 28nm 4+4 A53 little.LITTLE SoC with a Mali T860MP4.
It's a competitor to Mediatek's P20 and Snapdragon 625, not to X30.

This is most probably going into their Redmi line. I'm a big fan of the Redmis, I always recommend them to people on a 150-200€ budget, but that line of phones would never get a X30.

 

A 28nm 8 cores A53 is disappointing for a 2017 SOC. When there are cheap Finfet process nodes and new IPs like Cortex A73 or new Mali G-51/71 that brings a noticeable bump in performance and efficiency without increasing the cost/area.

 

Yeah, even helio x20 with 20nm is already a power hog.

I'm baffled why xiaomi chose 28nm

 

Overwhelmingly the reason will be cost. 28 is much much cheaper than 16/14/12/10, due to tech and maturity.

 

The tiny Qualcomm SD625 is manufactured at 16nmFF+ ( i think it was launch before the more cheap Compact version was available ) and it is being sold in devices around 200$. I just think it is too little too late. It is not like they are doing this starting from zero they partnership with Leadcore ( if i am not wrong ) which has some experience designing SOCs. And if we go to details like memory controller, image signal processor, modem and other stuff... They have a long way.

 

Qualcomm have different economic scales in play to justify advanced tech for something like 625. Pine Cone are just getting started, so playing it safe with something easy to make and integrate, with established IP, on a cheap and very mainstream process, is a good way to test the waters with low risk. It's their first chip after all.

 

I don't get why Snapdragon 650 isn't used a lot more widely, as it does so much better than any of the little.LITTLE solutions out there.
Maybe it's a lot more expensive but damn, the 650 really is a sheep in wolf's clothing.

 

they did give it a weaker gpu that the qc 8xx socs

 

Which 8xx?
The GPU is practically on par with the Snapdragon 808. In fact, I'd say the 650 is pretty much a 808 "done right".
Qualcomm could probably get away with calling it a Snapdragon 809 or 812 or something.

It's such a shame they haven't introduced a 14FF shrink of Snapdragon 650, like they've done with the 615 -> 625.
Maybe they haven't because doing so could turn the 820 into a harder sale.

 

I note that the recent IMG GDC2017 blog posting states "The Helio X30 integrates a Series7XT six-cluster design.....", whereas the mediatek info calls it an MP4
https://www.imgtec.com/blog/imagination-gdc-2017-demos-on-show/

Some reference to tessellation in that article.

 

Pretty bad typo to type "six" when you were trying to type "four"

If it's incorrect then it's bad data more than bad fingers.