As it turns out, a fresh new leak allegedly coming from inside MediaTek research facilities suggests that the new Helio X20 chip runs at lower temperatures compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810. However, do note that this isn’t coming officially from MediaTek, as we’re talking about a leak. Who knows, maybe these tests are meant to be internal, but only time will tell if MediaTek wants to make this official. In order to perform the heat test of the two chips, MediaTek used a couple of dummy devices, one powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, and the other powered by the MediaTek Helio X20. The original report mentions that the test units had Android 4.4 KitKat installed and lacked cellular connectivity. There seems to have been three separate stages in the test: The Snapdragon 810 seems to fare better than the Helio X20 in the first stage started but at the end of the second stage, the Snapdragon 810 had allegedly heated all the way to about 38 degrees Celsius, while the Helio X20 was a bit cooler at 33 degrees Celsius. Things got even worse for Snapdragon during the third stage, when the chip allegedly reached a maximum temperature of almost 45 degrees, while the Helio X20 only heated up to about 33 degrees. The Helio X20 comes with two ARM Cortex-A72 and this seems to have been the biggest reason for the big difference in the third stage ofthe test. It seems that MediaTek’s chip is able to detect a temperature that’s above 33 degrees Celsius and when it does, it switches to the two ARM Cortex-A72 cores. So that you don’t get lost in so many cores, you should know that the Helio X20 features 2 high power A72 cores clocked at 2.5 GHz , 4 mid-power A53 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz and also 4 low-power cores clocked at 1.4 GHz. Of course, it’s way too early to tell if one chip’s better than the other, but by the looks of it, MediaTek is all set to become a major player in the mobile chip-making business.
