BARCELONA—Battery life is a hot topic among phone makers right now. The Galaxy Note 7 recall showed that there's a limit to how much battery you can safely put into a slim phone, and yet smartphone owners still want more time without charging. Chipmaker Mediatek is aiming to solve this paradox with processors that sip power, company co-COO Jeffrey Ju says.
"Last year, there was a disaster event [with the Note 7] ... that kind of event brings all of our customers to the attention that they can't push the battery [capacity] too high because it becomes more dangerous. [Now] the battery capacity will slightly stop or even go down for the safety issue," he said.
Mediatek's newest chip, the Helio X30, isn't focused on pumping the fastest possible speeds. Instead, it delivers performance similar to last year's X20 with 25 percent power savings. Compared to a "competitor's 14nm chipset" (probably a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820), it can have 40 percent power savings in heavy usage conditions, Ju said.
The power savings comes from three sources. There's Mediatek's move to 10nm chips (which Qualcomm is also doing this year) and its CorePilot 4 scheduling software. The Helio X30 has an unusual design with three sets of cores rather than the usual two, which means it leans more than other chips on intelligent scheduling to properly balance power and computing needs. And a technology to reduce screen power dynamically analyzes images to shrink screen energy demands by 20-25 percent.
"We have the same hardware architecture [as the X20] but a much better scheduler for power consumption," Ju said.
Coming Soon to Sprint and Verizon
Mediatek is currently the only chip maker other than Qualcomm with phones sold on all four major carriers in the US. It broke through on Sprint and Verizon last year with some LG phones, and we'll see Mediatek phones "with some other vendors as well" this year, Ju said.
Here at Mobile World Congress, LG announced the X Power 2, the successor to Sprint's Mediatek-powered X Power. Ironically, the X Power 2 has a huge battery—4,500mAh—but then again, it doesn't use the X30. For the next year at least, Mediatek phones in the US will generally run on the midrange P series chips, not the high-end X series, Ju said.
"The X series will be running majorly in China and Asia," he said.
A big part of Mediatek's US breakthrough was being able to create CDMA modems for the Sprint and Verizon networks. CDMA is mostly a Qualcomm proprietary technology, and Qualcomm's licensing rates have come under fire in China, Korea, and by Apple in the US.
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Mediatek doesn't actually have to pay Qualcomm to use CDMA; rather, phone makers pay based on the overall cost of each phone, something Ju says is "outrageous." That also neutralizes some of the cost advantage phone makers might find for choosing Mediatek over Qualcomm in the US.
"If you upgrade your internal storage from 32GB to 128GB, you pay $30 to the NAND flash company but also pay another dollar to Qualcomm. That's ridiculous," Ju said. "One of our Chinese customers made a very specific niche model for young females, with 84 Swarovski crystals around the edge, and he had to pay Qualcomm royalties for that based on the phone price. How could that be?"