MediaTek Helio G85 gaming SoC announced, debuted on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9

MediaTek entered the mobile gaming space last year with a dedicated lineup of chipsets aimed at mobile gamers. The MediaTek Helio G90T was the flagship in the lineup and debuted with the Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 Pro, followed by the Helio G80 and the Helio G70 SoCs. Now, the fabless chip-maker has announced the Helio G85, which debuted on the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 announced on Thursday.

The Helio G85 may sound like a step down from the HelioG90, but according to Xiaomi, the chipset is “Made for everyday gamers”, and sits between the Helio G80 and the Helio G90. The Helio G85 is an octa-core SoC with 2+6 core arrangement. There are two performance-centric ARM Cortex-A5 cores clocked at up to 2.0GHz and six Cortex A55 cores for efficiency. The clockspeeds of the efficiency cores were not revealed at the launch event.

The spec sheet of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 reveals the Helio G85 rocks a 1000MHz ARM Mali G52 GPU, which is ever so slightly more powerful than the Helio G80. However, the CPU configuration and clock-speeds remain the same.

Xiaomi did share some benchmarks at the launch event which pegged the Helio G85-powered Redmi Note 9 beat the Snapdragon 665 and the Exynos 9611, both of which power devices in the Rs 10000-15000 price range in India.

However, owing to the recent controversy around boosting benchmark scores which MediaTek has found itself in, synthetic benchmarks scores should be taken with a pinch of salt.