MediaTek Executive Forum 2015, London: MediaTek used an event today to highlight its efforts in the high-end smartphone market, having largely built its mobile strength to date on products targeting mainstream devices.

The company is moving up the chain with its Helio-branded products, which were unveiled earlier this year. “Helio has been very quickly recognised and appreciated for its high performance and low power consumption. And many international and Chinese customers have already launched high-end smartphones using the solution,” Johan Lodenius, CMO of MediaTek, said.

“Last year people were questioning, are you in the high end segment, do you have the performance, do you have the low power? This year, we can happily say that yes indeed, we do,” he continued.

Vendors using MediaTek’s current octacore Helio chips for high-spec devices include HTC (One M9+) and Sony (Xperia M5), as well as others in China and elsewhere. “The customers have reacted much better than we expected at the beginning of this year,” Jeffrey Ju, SVP of MediaTek, added.

MediaTek is going for the bragging rights with its Helio X20, which has a ten core processor with tri-cluster architecture, to provide three performance (and power consumption) profiles intended to match different use cases. Rival products (and other MediaTek chips) use a two-stage profile, which is less efficient when dealing with mid- and low-level applications.

This approach also differs from that of main rival Qualcomm, which said its forthcoming Snapdragon 820 will enable different functional cores such as CPU, GPU and DSP cores to be combined to boost performance and save power, rather than using the same cores for different tasks.

Snapdragon 820 has a “custom-designed 64-bit quadcore CPU as part of a comprehensive redesign of our premium-tier mobile processor”, the San Diego-based company said.

“The secret sauce is somewhere in between hardware and software – it’s about systems. You don’t solve this by being good at cores, or at software, you solve it by being good at systems. I would say that some of our competitors have been trying to steer the question over to get the answers they like,” Lodenius said when asked about the differing strategies.

Also in the pipeline is Helio P10, a 2GHz 64-bit octacore processor targeting “slim form-factor smartphones that provide premium, flagship features”.

Lodenius said that smartphones using MediaTek’s next-generation processors will be available by the end of this year, although Ju indicated that Helio X20 devices may come later.