MediaTek has announced its Dimensity 800 platform will shortly be powering 5G phones in Europe over the coming months after an earlier push in China. The platform sits underneath the Dimensity 1000 in MediaTek’s range.

The company is targeting an October launch for handsets featuring the new chipset which supports Wi-Fi 5 rather than the newer Wi-Fi 6 and 2.34 Gbps download speeds over sub-6Ghz 5G networks.

MediaTek’s European head Pascal Lemasson wouldn’t be drawn on who will launch new handsets featuring the tech, but since many top Chinese vendors have phones with MediaTek hardware it should be some established brands.

Last year MediaTek beat Qualcomm and Huawei to produce the first fully-integrated 5G platform, while it recently announced the Dimensity 720 to take on Qualcomm Snapdragon 690.

The Dimensity 800 is a step on from that and will but up against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700 series. The hardware integrates four ARM Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.0GHz in an octa-core CPU, alongside an ARM Mali-G57 GPU and MediaTek’s AI Processing Unit 3.0 (APU) which is similar to that in the Dimensity 1000.

In a briefing to announce the new hardware, MediaTek was keen to stress the chipset balances the need for performance with power efficiency. Rob Moffat, MediaTek’s head of European business development talked through the technologies used:

"As you move to 5G, power efficiency is very important. As we have premium application processor features in terms of video capture, display and gaming power efficiency is obviously very important. ARM has a solution and we have a solution called CorePilot.

"We've taken that stage further in the 5G products. We have a feature called UltraSave where we're optimising the modem itself. This manages the modem in real-time. So when the device is connected over 5G, the algorithms dynamically adjust the current configuration and operating frequency of the modem itself so this allows us to start saving power in terms of the high intensity [of] 5G connectivity."

Moffat also confirmed that MediaTek’s Helio hardware will remain as 4G rather than moving to 5G.