MediaTek to announce its first 5G modem M70 in the first half of 2019: Report

Jumping on the 5G express, chip maker MediaTek has announced that it is working on its very first 5G modem, called M70, and it is expected to be in devices in the first half of 2019. The company CEO Cai Lixing confirmed this news and said that we could expect the modem to be hitting somewhere in the first half of next year.

As per the report by GizChina, this does not mean that this 5G modem will be coming on MediaTek chipsets. Lixing has said that MediaTek SoCs with 5G modems will be introduced to devices in 2020. MediaTek is said to have devoted most of its resources towards 5G and that it has gained useful insights in the 4G period.

MediaTek will be preparing to shift its R&D budget towards developing 5G technology, said Lixing. This news means that industry leaders such as Apple, which sources modems for its iPhones from other companies, will have another option on the table as well. There have been earlier talks of MediaTek supplying Apple 5G modems for next year’s iPhones and the M70 will most likely be that modem.

Last month, MediaTek announced a new chip is called the Helio P70 , and as the name suggests, it succeeds the Helio P60. The new chip is built on a 12 nm process and features an updated APU and improved AI performance. The CPU is an 8-core unit with 4x ARM Cortex A73 cores at 2.1 GHz and 4x Cortex A53 cores at 2 GHz. These are paired with an updated GPU, the ARM Mali-G72 MP3.