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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Meteor2 - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
You folk know this is a tech site, right?Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
Tech is extremely reliant upon land use politics, including things like eminent domain. How do so many large tech companies try to get buildings going? They do it by demanding taxpayers to bribe them to come. Tech products don't spring out of thin air.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
One of the critical questions facing humanity is to what degree is what is called capitalism required to facilitate a thriving tech advancement. That is directly tied to the deteriorating global ecology. Ignoring that in favor of a mere stream of press releases from tech companies isn't the role of a thinking individual.mode_13h - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link
> Ignoring that in favor of a mere stream of press releases from tech> companies isn't the role of a thinking individual.
What is your point? That all readers should abandon this site? Or do you expect Anandtech to switch from covering the tech industry to covering economic and environmental justice? You know that's not going to happen.
mode_13h - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link
> Tech is extremely reliant upon land use politics, including things like eminent domain.No, there's no justification for dragging the Amish into this. You're just inventing a controversy as flame-bait. And when I call you on it, you always change the subject. That's practically a flat-out admission of guilt, right there.
mode_13h - Wednesday, November 24, 2021 - link
> You folk know this is a tech site, right?I'd be happy just to talk about tech. But, trolls are gonna troll. Mods don't remove (a lot of) their posts, so we have to fact-check their disinformation.
Welcome to the internet.
Oxford Guy - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
''‘Real communism” means the government has “withered away”. Any place like that? No.'According to a documentary I saw some years ago, there is a communistic community in an isolated part of China — a matriarchal minority.
The conflation of 'big/powerful/well-known' with 'it exists' is utterly common but it's not accurate. Plenty of communistic communities have existed. Some still exist. Given China's dismantling of various minorities' communities for things like dam projects, though... I don't know if that matriarchal community still exists.
As communism is about peaceful cooperating/sharing, it's not particularly surprising that such cultures fall to aggressive greed-oriented ones. The jailer's game ('prisoners' dilemma) appears to have one solution, when it comes to human temperament — unless geographical isolation protects the pacifists from the aggressors.
FunBunny2 - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
"believes that the Nazi's were socialists"all too often the Right Wingnuts twist the Nazi's use of language to twist the Prog folks everywhere. Goebbel's knew exactly what he was doing. just like recent liars.
AnsyX - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
I fought the Communists, and I can tell you there is NO humanity in them -- any more than there were the Nazi's. Still, why don't we limit the conversation to the topic at hand? Let's get back a bit more respect for ourselves, each other, and our profession.mode_13h - Sunday, November 21, 2021 - link
> I fought the Communists, and I can tell you there is NO humanity in themIf you're truly a soldier, then you're the least-trustworthy judge of the enemy's humanity. Soldiers are explicitly taught not to see such things. Your enemies will have been manipulated in similar ways. War is an exercise involving two groups of people taught not to see each other's humanity, in order for them to act more inhumanely towards each other.
> any more than there were the Nazi's.
We like to believe the Germans of the 1940's are different from us, but the story of ethnic cleansing and brutality has been repeated throughout human history. It helps to have some humility, if we have any hope of breaking the cycle.
That's not to justify or excuse any government or political system. I just think it's counterproductive to dehumanize their members or followers. Indeed, can you really even hold someone accountable for their misdeeds, if you deny their very humanity?