With MediaTek 9000 SoC, Android smartphones could challenge Apple's flagships
Taiwan-based semiconductor company MediaTek has announced its latest flagship Dimensity 9000 processor for smartphones. It is the world's first system-on-chip (SoC) to use TSMC's 4nm architecture, ARM Cortex-X2 CPU core, Mali-G710 GPU, LPDDR5X RAM, as well as Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. MediaTek Dimensity 9000-fueled smartphones are said to arrive in the first quarter of 2022. Here are more details.
Why does it matter?
At present, OEMs mostly use MediaTek chipsets for their mid- and budget-range offerings and reserve Qualcomm SoCs for the premium models. With the Dimensity 9000 processor, MediaTek is looking to persuade tech companies and customers to transition to MediaTek-powered flagship smartphones. In the Android-run world, it will go against Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon 898 chipset and Samsung's Exynos 2200 processor.
The CPU is arranged in a 1+3+4 setup
The MediaTek Dimensity 9000 chipset has one ARM Cortex-X2 core speeding at 3.05GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores working at 2.85GHz, and four Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. It promises 35% performance improvement over other Android flagship processors, as per the company. The SoC also packs a 10-core Mali G-710 GPU which is touted to offer 60% improved power efficiency and supports Ray Tracing on Vulkan.
It is the first SoC to support 320MP camera resolution
The Dimensity 9000 chipset comes with an 18-bit Imagiq790 ISP with a 9 gigapixel per second processing speed, which is significantly higher than Snapdragon 888's 2.7 gigapixels per second. It is the first SoC to support 320MP camera resolution and is also capable of recording 4K HDR videos from three cameras simultaneously. The chip also offers a "Super Night Video Recording" mode for videos.
It is equipped with a 'Release 16' 5G modem
The Dimensity 9000 chipset enables up to 180Hz screen refresh rate at Full-HD+ resolution and 144Hz at QHD+ resolution. It supports the "Release 16" 5G modem and provides up to 300MHz of sub-6GHz bandwidth with 3CC carrier aggregation. However, it lacks mmWave support. Other connectivity features include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Beidou III-B1C GNSS as well as Wireless Stereo Audio.
Performance will be on par with A15 Bionic chipset: MediaTek
Compared to current Android flagship processors, which could indirectly mean the Snapdragon 888, the Dimensity 9000 processor is said to have achieved 35% higher scores on SPECint 2006 benchmark and 10.5% more on Geekbench. It has also outperformed Google's Tensor SoC on the ETHZ AI benchmark. According to MediaTek, the performance of Dimensity 9000 SoC will be on par with Apple's A15 Bionic chipset.
