(Telecompaper) MediaTek announced an industry first with a ten-core smartphone processor. The MediaTek Helio X20 comes with the company's Tri-Cluster CPU architecture and the WorldMode Category 6 LTE modem with carrier aggregation. The Helio X20 is expected to be available in consumer products by the end of this year. MediaTek's Tri-Cluster CPU architecture provides three processor clusters, each designed to handle different types of workloads. The Tri-Cluster CPU consists of one cluster of two ARM Cortex-A72 cores (running at 2.5GHz for extreme performance) and two clusters of four ARM Cortex-A53 cores (one running at 2.0GHz for medium loads and one running at 1.4GHz for light activities). Like adding gears to vehicles, dividing the cores into three clusters provides a more efficient allocation of tasks for optimum performance and extended battery life, MediaTek said. The Tri-Cluster CPU architecture is enabled by MediaTek's new CorePilot 3.0 heterogeneous computing scheduling algorithm. CorePilot 3.0 schedules the tasks for all CPUs and GPUs on the SoC while managing power and thermal effects so that extreme performance can be attained while creating less heat. It provides up to a 30 percent reduction of power consumption compared with conventional dual cluster architectures, the company claims. Additional features of the Helio X20 include dual main cameras with a built-in 3D depth engine, multi-scale de-noise engines to deliver high-quality images and a 120Hz mobile display for crisp and responsive browsing and motion viewing. The MediaTek Helio X20 will start sampling in Q3.