Conclusion & First Impressions

MediaTek’s re-entry in the flagship SoC space with the Dimensity 9000 comes at quite the opportunistic time in the landscape. The company has had a very successful 2021 with large market share gains, and we’ve even seen this translate into more exposure in more visible design wins in the market, such as the OnePlus Nord 2 series or the Xiaomi 11T.

Having seen large market share gains and being able to fill in a huge gap in the market where Huawei and HiSilicon were in the past, the Dimensity 9000 seems to have come at the perfect time, as more vendors want to be able to differentiate their highest end devices and diversify their reliance on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series.

The Dimensity 9000, on paper, and by the specification, looks like an extremely strong SoC for 2022 flagships. On the CPU side of things, MediaTek has fully equipped the SoC with near the maximum possible configuration – high frequencies, large caches, and surprisingly enough for us today, a full performance configuration of the new Cortex-A510 cores. The 8MB L3 is helped by a new 6MB system cache that further improves memory performance, which the Dimensity 9000 of is currently the first and only chip to support new LPDDR5X.

The GPU side, the chip likely will be the only design for 2022 with a large Mali GPU. Advertised performance figures are good, but what matters most is power efficiency and sustained performance. While the metrics here are still a bit vague, the N4 process node of the chip, again, the first of its kind, is likely to position the chip in an excellently against 2021 devices, and if Qualcomm and Samsung don’t have major leaps in their upcoming designs, also position the Dimensity 9000 extremely well against the 2022 competition.

MediaTek’s camera and ISP leaps are also just huge. We haven’t really had many camera-centric phones powered by MediaTek silicon over the last few years, so if vendors are able to take advantage of the chip’s new camera architecture remains to be seen, but at least the high-level specifications are definitely worthy of 2022 flagships.

The chip’s lack of mmWave is likely limit its success to non-US markets and devices, but that’s a situation we generally become used to over the years.

The Dimensity 9000 is MediaTek’s strongest showing in years, and has the specifications and heft to properly shake up the high-end market. I see it competing against, or even besting whatever Qualcomm has in queue for next year, which is a pretty shocking turn of events. What matters now, is for MediaTek to actually have the high-profile flagship device design wins, to be able to fully rationalise their investment in such a SoC. Luckily, we’ve been told the chip has already sampled to customers, and we’re to expect commercial device launches in the first quarter of 2022. Exciting times are ahead in the mobile SoC space.

5th Generation APU/NPU, a Massive ISP, and New 5G & WiFi
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  • mode_13h - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link

    > Rarity is irrelevant.

    It's not when you're clearly implying it will be used to dispossess many thousands of their land.

    Sure, you can pick through wikipedia and find rare exceptions, but the general rule actually counts for something. The Supreme Court case you reference was lost because it was badly argued, not because it was wrong in principle.

    The reason there's not much use of eminent domain, and what prompted the US Federal Government to follow that ruling by instituting an explicit policy only to use it for matters of public use & with just compensation is that it's politically unpopular. If some people start getting their property taken unjustly, it creates a panic among others that they could also be on the receiving end of such actions. That's why it's naturally self-limiting and was previously used mainly against the politically disenfranchised.

    I get that you're anti-American. I don't even take issue with that. I do take issue with misrepresentations and distortions.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link

    'I get that you're anti-American.'

    This is why I informed you that I don't read your posts anymore. I just jump to the expected ad hom at the end.

    This forum would be improved with your account removed.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link

    > This forum would be improved with your account removed.

    Obviously, so that you could spread your FUD and disinformation, virtually unchallenged. Don't like it? Find somewhere else to haunt.

    The main takeaway I get from your posts is that you're almost as lazy as you are cynical. You think you can brush away logic, reason, sound argumentation, and facts with unsubstantiated allegations of fallacies, "ad hom's", and a few lazy insults of your own. Nobody is buying it.

    Rest assured that as long as you keep trolling and spreading disinformation on here, I intend to counter it.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link

    Your posts are far too consistent in terms of the bad faith pattern of using ad hominem as a crutch. People who are able and willing to discuss and debate in a factual manner are beneficial. Those who rely upon trickery aren’t.

    I expect that you’ll criticize me again in your response to these posts but the tu quoque fallacy (and/or conventional ad hom) won’t erase your clear track record of bad-faith/corrupt argumentation in which the character of the poster becomes the subject rather than the actual subject in contention. That goes hand-in-hand with your 'I imagine'/'I'm guessing" tactic of stuffing words into mouths.

    There is not a single poster who frequents this forum who abuses ad hom as frequently as you do, not even close. You and anyone else are free to dislike the assertions I made and challenge the information I post, so long as it’s done without personal attack.

    You have not learned that lesson, despite me highlighting the importance of good-faith discourse many times. Agreeing me some things I write, tepidly or fully, does not erase the ad hom duplicity. I stooped to that level briefly when I became exasperated (the AI comment) but I’m not going to be drawn into that again. Stick to the issues or put a cork in it.
  • mode_13h - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link

    > Your posts are far too consistent in terms of the bad faith pattern

    Same. Answering your bad-faith posts gets so tiresome that I sometimes lessen the tedium by replying in kind.

    And you're one to talk about crutches.

    > People who are able and willing to discuss and debate in a factual manner are beneficial.
    > Those who rely upon trickery aren’t.

    Agreed.

    > your clear track record of bad-faith/corrupt argumentation

    Nobody appointed you as an adjudicator of our exchanges, and you're hardly impartial. You declare fallacies as if a self-evident and irrefutable fact, rather than the biased opinion of a counter-party. Your accusations are unsubstantiated, almost without exception. If you want a claim to stick, you need to support it.

    > That goes hand-in-hand with your 'I imagine'/'I'm guessing" tactic of stuffing words into mouths.

    It's a rhetorical form of conjecture. It's a presumption I'm proffering with sufficient qualification that it's not to be taken as established fact, and is indeed open to challenge. This is a chat forum. I'm not going to buttress every claim with citations, especially those garnering no objections. And I cannot know, a priori, to which someone might object.

    > Agreeing me some things I write, tepidly or fully, does not erase the ad hom duplicity.

    Get over yourself, guy. I don't care what some internet rando thinks about me, much less one who spouts as much nonsense and trolls as much as you do.

    Do what you want, but I take each post on its merits (or lack thereof).

    > Stick to the issues or put a cork in it.

    How about you not abruptly try to hijack these forums for your own agenda? So long as there are willing participants, it's fine if conversation sometimes naturally meanders. But it's obvious and jarring, when you inject a new subject apropos of absolutely nothing, that you're really not participating in these forums entirely in good faith. The purpose of these forums is to discuss the subject matter of the articles & closely-related topics. That's why most of us are here.

    BTW, I think you'll find that nearly all of the friction between us also happens in off-topic tangents. In fact, if you'd stay more on-topic, I think you'd encounter much less friction between yourself and everyone else.
  • Thud2 - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link

    So, what do you guys think of that new Mediatek Dimensity SoC? I sure would like to find some forum where I could easily find people opinions about it.
  • melgross - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link

    The Amish won’t see their land confiscated because the own it. What they don’t own, but may use in communal rights can’t be taken, because it’s not theirs to begin with.
  • Oxford Guy - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link

    Eminent domain exists, has been used, can be used again.
  • melgross - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link

    ‘Real communism” means the government has “withered away”. Any place like that? No. What we think of as communist countries like the old USSR and Mao’s China, as well as N Korea, were, or are socialist dictatorships. The only real one left now is N Korea. The others are more strongman run socialist/capitalist.
  • mode_13h - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link

    > ‘Real communism” means the government has “withered away”.

    Huh? Source?

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