MediaTek has announced the launch of its MediaTek Helio P25, the newest addition to the MediaTek Helio P series mobile processor family. The new chipset combines a 16nm Octa-core processor with MediaTek Imagiq (the company's advanced Image Signal Processor (ISP) technology) and dual camera features to satisfy smartphone photographers.

The Helio P25 adopts a 16nm FinFET process node, offering up to 25% better power efficiency. The Octa-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor is clocked at up to 2.5GHz while on the graphics side it benefits from the recent ARM Mali-T880 dual GPU clocked at up to 900MHz. The chipset also supports enhanced uploads in LTE (up to 64QAM uplink for LTE-TDD mode) and low power double data rate random access memory (LPDDR4x) up to 6GB.

The MediaTek Helio P25 also supports advanced camera effects such as shallow depth-of-field and high performance auto exposure. The 12bit Dual ISP also offers resolution up to 24MP for a single camera or 13MP+13MP for a dual camera, high dynamic range (HDR) and video HDR with full preview and high performance auto exposure with turbo 3A to accelerate AE convergence speed by 30-55%.

Smartphones powered by MediaTek Helio P25 are expected to be on the market in the first quarter of 2017.

According to a recently published Digitimes Research Special Report, MediaTek is expected to see more than 11% on-year shipment growth in 2017 thanks to its partnership with Samsung Electronics.

However, much of the growth will come from supplying entry-level APs for inexpensive smartphones. Thus, MediaTek has been looking to push the Helio series product line to become more competitive in the higher end of the market.