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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Silver5urfer - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
MediaTek is the worst offender in GNU GPL v2 Linux Kernel guidelines, their junk always ends up being abandoned by OEM and Modding community as well. Until they can beat CAF of Qcomm, they are junk.All that is just the new ARM IP talk simply getting it first to market that's it makes sense since it's a Taiwanese corporation so TSMC is allowing them on this first dibs ?, and the worst part of these ARM processors including Apple is omega AI capabilities this that and woahh but what do they provide for end user ? Nothing. Android barely has any APIs that allow the developers to do something, mostly these AI stuff is used for ISP and Camera and other camera gimmickry. Once Apple launches their Auto Hash scanning on their platform everyone will soon follow, Google loves to ape Apple so they will be first irrespective of how hard it is on Android due to Play Services and all the different vendors.
Moomoo123 - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
Yea... basically a garbage CPU manufactured with stolen Intellectual Property/Tech from a garbage communist country. Wait for the Qualcomm's lol.anonomouse - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
just a small note for your bigotry: this company is Taiwanese. not communist. not sure what is supposed to be "stolen" here either.R0H1T - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
You hear that sound, no? Let's try it again, slowly ~ Whoooosh 👍logoffon - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
I can't hear that either.In seriousness, I don't think that's how you make fun of people who don't get a joke.
Unashamed_unoriginal_username_x86 - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
How do you know it's a joke? If I said something stupid and edgy too, would you come to my defense as well?nandnandnand - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Sounds like a crash landing to me.Spunjji - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Awfully bold of you to assume that was a jokeKangal - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
I agree with the others, the comment section here has derailed and turned into poo.There is A LOT here to commend MediaTek for.
But they have five major criticisms that they need addressing for them to match Qualcomm, let alone exceed Apple.
1- Make sure this is not another vaporware or paper-launch. Pump these chips out. We want to see your FLAGSHIP product out there and in tens-of-millions units in use by consumers.
2- Quit that nonsense about cheating in graphs, benchmarks, and false showings. It doesn't lift you up, it drags everybody down.
3- Provide drivers, source-code, documentation, and be very GPLv2 friendly. Support third-party developers, give bootloader unlock codes, and generally make consumers happy.
4- Officially announce and support their chipset for long-term (min x4 AndroidOS Platforms/3+ years update)
5- Focus on refining your product. Be willing to lose marketing points, or even the performance crown if it means having a better device for users/higher efficiency and very little throttling. Work on those drivers, Adreno is killing it out there compared to Mali.
Hopefully you'll swing by the right direction. We will be watching, and hoping you do. Best of luck 👍
Dizoja86 - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
If he thinks China is communist because the political party has it in the name, he probably also genuinely believes that the Nazi's were socialists.