In the last year, MediaTek stopped being the chipset maker for cheap smartphones. With the introduction of the Dimensity chipsets the company not only wants to democratize 5G connectivity but has also earned itself a deserved space in the elite club of leading 5G chipset makers like Qualcomm and Samsung.
MediaTek, which dominates the chipset market with a 40% share, has announced a new true flagship SoC to power the next wave of phones in the premium and flagship price segment.
The MediaTek Dimensity 9000 is an advanced chipset built on TSMC’s 4nm fabrication process and is the first mobile chip that features Arm’s new computing core – Cortex X2.
MediaTek Dimensity 9000: specs and features
The new chipset has been announced at the ongoing Summit conference and built with a 4nm fabrication process; this is the only chipset in its category as of now.
Apart from this, this extremely powerful SoC records quite a few firsts – including the first one to include Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless connectivity and the first sub-6GHz 5G mobile chipset to house a Cortex-X2 core that can power the new always-connected Arm-based computing devices. This core is clocked at up to 3.05Ghz.
The chipset is arranged in a 1+3+4 setup wherein apart from that sole Cortex-X2 core, it has a cluster of 3x Cortex-A710 Super cores and 4x Cortex A510 efficiency cores. Additionally, it has a large 14MB of system cache memory, which according to MediaTek offers up to 7% improvement in performance and 25% improvement in bandwidth consumption.
Other features of this extreme chipset include LPDDR5X memory with a speed of up to 7500 Mbps, a multimode 5G/4G modem, and a downlink of up to 7Gbps and 3CC carrier aggregation.
Talking about the imaging capabilities of this chipset, the company says that its new 18-bit Imagiq Gen 7 ISP is the world's first ISP that can capture images up to 320-megapixels - that said the smartphone sensor should have the hardware to shoot such hi-res images.
MediaTek says that this SoC is capable of capturing 4K HDR videos simultaneously from three camera sensors and can process a total of 270 frames per second.
It is also the first SoC to house Arm Mali G710 GPU which boasts 35% improved performance and is up to 60% power efficient. This GPU can support a FullHD+ display with a 180 Hz refresh rate. Another great news for gamers is that the chipset maker is adding a raytracing SDK that can help take the mobile gaming experience several notches higher.
Summing it up
Though the company had attempted to take on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 series SoC’s with the Dimensity 1200 chipsets, the performance didn’t quite match. That said, this new chipset has surpassed benchmark scores of Android flagships and is similar to that of a 2021 flagship – hinting at both Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and Apple’s A15 Bionic chipset.
Where this chipset might struggle against the competition slightly is the fact that it comes with built-in sub-6GHz 5G support without the faster mmWave standard.
That said, Qualcomm is also going to announce its flagship SoC soon and phones powered by these new powerful SoC will be out in the market by Q1 2022.
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