MediaTek Announces Dimensity 9000: Supercharged Flagship SoC on 4nm
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 18, 2021 6:00 PM ESTConclusion & 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.
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at_clucks - Sunday, November 21, 2021 - link
Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless around him every day, thousands die, but the dude is worried about how evil communists are. Most people are minimally educated, and most of that minimal education is propaganda.I guess our friend there never noticed capitalism has no humanity in it either, people are homeless or poisoned every day *because* their well-being can't be quantified on a balance sheet, or worse, because harming their well-being can be quantified in the extra profit it allows. Hell, the Flint water crisis would have cost $80/day to avoid and yet 20000 children alone were exposed to dangerous levels of lead to save that money.
People just need to bury their head in the sand and assume they're on the right side of morality. We are good so they are bad.
mode_13h - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link
> people are homeless or poisoned every day *because* their well-being can't be> quantified on a balance sheet, or worse, because harming their well-being can be
> quantified in the extra profit it allows.
These are not problems capitalism was intended to solve. That's the role of government. It's government's job to put guard rails on what corporations can do, so that their interests don't run counter to that of the citizens. How well it's done varies, but the solution is to improve government's regulation of the economy, rather than to dispense with capitalism altogether.
> the Flint water crisis
That wasn't a corporate decision. It was the indebted state of Michigan trying to save money in a reckless and incompetent way. It has nothing to do with your previous point.
at_clucks - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link
@mode_13h "These are not problems capitalism was intended to solve"No but ignoring them is a act lacking humanity from all those "capitalist" individuals, making it particularly ironic for AnsyX to act worried about how "communists have no humanity". And do I really need to keep giving you examples of how capitalists have proven heartless again and again in that ultimate capitalist quest of maximizing profits?
Also I can make 2 points in a single comment. The state of Michigan is, to my knowledge, almost entirely capitalist both as population and leadership. Any action lacking humanity there is "capitalist lack of humanity".
Just trying to highlight how asinine is for someone to come here and say how they fought communists and they have no humanity. That kind of conviction and use of a very wide brush non-ironically or just to make a counterpoint is representative of low education and/or IQ.
mode_13h - Thursday, November 25, 2021 - link
> do I really need to keep giving you examples of how capitalists have proven heartlessNo. It's been said that many CEOs have sociopathic tendencies. The actions of corporations, if performed by a person, would definitely earn that person the label of a sociopath. That's where regulations are supposed to enter the picture. It's somewhat necessarily so, because "values" are hard to quantify, and one corporation will always argue that if they don't seize every opportunity and cut every cost, their competitors would, anyhow.
> The state of Michigan is, to my knowledge, almost entirely capitalist both as population
> and leadership. Any action lacking humanity there is "capitalist lack of humanity".
It exists in a capitalistic context, but it's not a for-profit entity. The goal of States is merely to balance their budgets, not make money. They face resource-management problems, just as states in communist countries would. Communism doesn't erase the fact that resources are finite, and even communist countries use money and have economic systems.
Arbie - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
Just noting: Nazi = Socialist is common on the alt-right deploraboards. That way they can conclude that Dems = Liberals = Socialists = Communists = Nazis.smalM - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link
Nazi is short for Nationalsozialist = national socialist. The acronym was created after Sozi = Sozialist = socialist.It is a leftist tall tale that the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei wasn't a socialist party.
melgross - Monday, November 22, 2021 - link
The Nazi’s were socialists. Hitler said so in his own writings. If you knew anything about their economy, you would know that.imoc - Wednesday, December 8, 2021 - link
LOL true. It's almost 2022 and people still think China is communist.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Taiwanese is a race, not a type of government, you bigot.Peter2k - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Taiwan is a democratic nation that isn't even recognized by 99% of other nationsIt's way closer to call it a government then a nation, since no one really recognizes it in an official manner
If you mean native Taiwanese, sure they are they're own race
But no one really means that, that's like Japan also has natives who are not genetically linked to Japanese as they themselves see them
Taiwanese are ethically Chinese
They migrated there for a few hundred years until finally the Kuomintang lost and retreated there with like 2 million in tow
But hey, at least you got to call some random person on the internet a bigot over an issue that will likely spark WWIII