MediaTek, which has been best known as one of the most successful purveyors for processors in midrange and inexpensive phones, has been moving higher up, and yesterday at Mobile World Congress, it introduced Helio, its new first brand for high-end smartphone chips.

The first entry in this family will be the Helio X10, which will be a 2.2GHz octa-core 64-bit design based on the ARM Cortex-A72 cores, due out later this year. (MediaTek didn't give details, but it would make sense this chip would have four A72 cores and four smaller A53 ones.)The company hopes to differentiate it with high-end multimedia features, and at its press conference, really focused on these features.

Senior vice president Jeffrey Ju introduced the Helio brand, saying it would eventually be composed of both the X series for extreme performance and the P series for "premium performance" (in other words, the high end of the midrange), with the P series being optimized for smaller printed circuit boards and lower battery consumption.

MediaTek, which has for a long time been a leader in providing chips for televisions, DVD players, and similar devices, hopes to use this heritage to help make the Helio line stand out. The X10 includes its MiraVision image-processing features, and will have support for 120Hz displays, which Ju said was an industry first. This allows for smoother scrolling, and a demo did show how their reference design did scroll more smoothly than on existing high-end phones. It can capture video content at 480 frames per second, allowing for "super slo motion" at 1/16 speed playback, and allows for faster camera focusing. Another feature, called Smart Screen, adjusts individual pixels in the display under different lighting conditions to reflect the ambient light and the content, which MediaTek said would provide easier to read displays while saving battery life.

CTO Kevin Jou introduced two chips that will make it to market sooner. First is the MT8173, with a pair of 2.4GHz A72 cores, along with two Cortex-A53 CPU cores in using ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. This chip will have an Imagination PowerVR GX6250 GPU, capable of playing 4K Ultra HD content and supporting high-end mobile graphics for gaming.

Jou held up a reference design, and said MediaTek expects to have this in devices in the second quarter.

MediaTek also announced its MT 6753, an octa-core chip aimed at midrange phones. This will have eight 64-bit, 1.5GHz A53 cores, along with an ARM Mali-T720 graphics processor, as well as integrated CDMA2000 and 4G LTE WorldMode modem and RF support. This will make it the first MediaTek chip that should work on all networks, including those in North America, Jou said.

The chip will also include MediaTek's CorePilot framework for power management and heterogeneous computing between CPU and GPU, effectively the company's version of heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA). It also will provide advanced multimedia capabilities like 1080p display support, and MediaTek MiraVision image processing.