MediaTek has announced a new processor that will power flagship phones in 2022. The new chipset is the Dimensity 9000 and it is the first 4nm mobile processor in the world. Boasting big improvements, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer has said that the new chipset should match the Apple A15 Bionic in some areas.
Among the top mobile chipsets manufacturers, MediaTek used to trail behind its biggest rival, Qualcomm for years. However, things turned around for the company following the switch to 5G. The company's wide array of 5G processors under its Dimensity line has contributed immensely to the democratization of 5G which has, in turn, led to its overtaking of Qualcomm to become the world's No.1 mobile SoC manufacturer. Despite the gain in market share, Mediatek has not been able to offer flagship chips that can challenge those from its rivals including Qualcomm and Samsung. That changes with this new processor.
The Dimensity 9000 processor will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and will be the first mobile chipset to be built on its new 4nm process. Mediatek has equipped it with the latest Arm CPU cores as well as the new Mali GPU. It also has an upgraded AI Processing Unit (APU) that has more cores. All of these contribute towards making the Dimensity 9000 more powerful than the Snapdragon 888+ and Exynos 2100, at least on paper. MediaTek even claims that the processor should match the Apple A15 chip inside the iPhone 13. The statement was made by Finbarr Moynihan, MediaTek's Vice President of Corporate Marketing, in an interview with Digital Trends. According to him “...the Dimensity 9000 should match the Apple A15 Bionic (which is built using a 5nm process) in multi-core benchmark tests, and reach an AnTuTu score of above a million for the first time.”
Big Performance Upgrades Paired With Improved Power Efficiency
Inside the Dimensity 9000 are eight CPU cores arranged in a 1+3+4 core arrangement. The “Ultra-Core” is the Arm Cortex-X2 clocked at 3.05GHz, the three “Super Cores” are the Cortex-A710 clocked at 2.85GHz, and the four Cortex-A510 “Efficiency Cores” are clocked at 1.8GHz. The Mali-G710 GPU has 10 cores while MediaTek's new 5th gen APU has six cores and boasts 4x the performance and power efficiency as the previous generation. The GPU supports ray tracing and phones with a refresh rate of up to 180Hz.
There is a new 18-bit HDR-ISP which MediaTek says is the world's first to support simultaneous 18-bit HDR video recording on three cameras at the same time. It is also the first ISP to support cameras with a 320MP resolution. The firsts don't stop there. The Dimensity 9000 is also the first processor with Bluetooth 5.3 and a 5G modem with 3GPP Release 16 standard technology. Unfortunately, like other MediaTek 5G chips, the Dimensity 9000 doesn't support mmWave but sub-6GHz networks. Nevertheless, it should still appear in phones that would be sold in the United States. The Dimensity 9000 should make its debut in a smartphone in Q1 2022.
Source: MediaTek, Digital Trends