Fudzilla asked around and we could not find any of Mediatek's big customers cancelling their Helio X20 product orders. MediaTek recently confirmed that there will be dozen designs based on X20 and it was surprising to hear the rumour that the SoC might be overheating.

MediaTek's official statement runs as follows:

“MediaTek Helio X20 has entered the mass production period. Our cooperation with customers remains tight and smooth as usual. MediaTek products are well noted for balancing high performance and low power consumption. By adopting the latest low power technology, Helio X20 performs well in both thermal control and power consumption. Overheating is not an issue. It’s an unfounded rumor.”

Core Pilot knows how and when to cool the SoC

At the heart of the SoC is CorePilot technology and one of the important things that we learned when we wrote about it is that MediaTek spents a lot of time on the core scheduling. This involved getting the core to its fastest state on heavy load (eg Game) and shut it down after the high demanding task is complete.

This is how to save battery life and stop the core from overheating. The Snapdragon 810's overheating was happening on a much less efficient Cortex A57 core and Qualcomm used four of them. MediaTek is using two higher performance Cortex A72 cores,

ARM said that the Cortex A72 has a better power and performance ratio over the Cortex A57 so overheating should not be happening. MediaTek MTK 8173 was running tablet at Computex just fine and this chip ended up in millions of Amazon Fire TV consoles. This SoC has two Cortex A72 cores running at 2.0 GHz and two power saving Cortex A53 cores that did not overheat on the 4K capable console even when running 4K native content.

The fact that MediaTek confirmed that the Helio X20 SoC went in the production means that company is happy with how the SoC is performing. We are still a month of two away from the first phones and we expect to see some finished Helio X20 phones in April.