MediaTek has finally entered the race of 5G mmWave band after two years of launching its first-ever integrated 5G chip. The new modem, named MediaTek M80 will support both Sub-6GHz and mmWave frequency bands, along with several improvements in other technologies, putting it against the Snapdragon’s X60 modem. Here’s more about it;
MediaTek’s first mmWave 5G chip
Though MediaTek unveiled the industry’s first-ever integrated 5G chip having M70 modem in 2019, it was pushed back by Snapdragon chips since then. This is because the latter ones are having better technologies, and are widely used by many OEMs than MediaTek’s. But now, MediaTek made itself stand against Qualcomm with its new 5G modem, MediaTek M80.
This new modem is a direct successor of M70 and has significant improvements made over it. Starting with frequencies, MediaTek’s new M80 supports both the mmWave and Sub-6GHz bands, and it’s an integrated one, thus be placed on the same die alongside ISP, GPU, and CPU. Regarding speeds, it has a theoretical downlink rate of 7.67Gbps and an uplink rate of 3.67Gbps.
It supports dual-band 5G, has dual Voice over New Radio (VoNR), supports Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS), and carrier aggregation (CA) across mmWave and sub-6GHz 5G bands. New additions include the UltraSave Content Awareness technologies and UltraSave Network Environment Detection for adjusting the power frequencies accordingly.
MediaTek hasn’t explained more in detail regarding the RF transceivers, end-to-end 5G communications, etc as explained by Qualcomm about its X60 modem. Yet, it officially entered the race of 5G dual-band, making it a close alternative to Snapdragon’s X60 modem picked by the premium smartphone OEMs.
This chip will not be coming to phones until the end of this year since it has quite room to improve and more functions to add to be chosen over Snapdragon’s X60. Yet, OEMs making premium 5G handsets may pick the new M80, if user affordability is their concern.
Source: Mediatek.com
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