MediaTek today announced a new flagship SoC for mobiles and tablets. The Helio X20 is the world's first tri-cluster SoC, featuring three different blocks containing multiple ARM cores. Adding all the cores, the Helio X20's count goes up to 10. Yup, this is a deca-core SoC designed for mobile devices.

The Helio X20 has its 10 cores distributed across three clusters. Cluster 1 consists of dual-core ARM Cortex A72 CPUs clocked at 2.5GHz, cluster 2 is quad-core ARM Cortex A53 block clocked at 2.0GHz, and finally cluster 3 is another quad-core ARM Cortex A53 block clocked at 1.4GHz.

Apart from featuring more CPU cores, the Helio X20 is MediaTek's first chip that has an integrated CDMA2000 compatible modem. The chip also supports LTE Cat. 6 with Carrier Aggregation, with support for speeds up to 300Mbps (downstream). Also, the new modem in the Helio X20 is said to be 30% more power efficient than the one in the Helio X10 SoC.

The dual-channel memory controller supports LPDDR3 memory @ 933MHz, which translates to 14.9GB/s of bandwidth. There's a Dual ISP that supports up to 32 megapixel camera sensors. Gaming on the Helio X20 is powered by ARM's next-gen Mali T800 series GPU, in MP4 (quad-core) configuration. The GPU is said to give a 40% boost in performance and a 40% drop in power consumption, compared to the PowerVR G6200 in the Helio X10 SoC. The maximum display resolution supported by the Helio X20 is 1440p (2560x1440), or Quad HD.

Using a tri-cluster CPU, MediaTek promises a 30% improvement in power consumption (we think they were referring to 'efficiency' here) over the usual dual-cluster CPU configuration. The Helio X20 SoC will be manufactured on TSMC's 20nm process.

The first devices powered by the Helio X20 SoC are scheduled to begin shipping in Q1 2016.