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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yeeeeman - Thursday, December 23, 2021 - link
Man, you have been freaking brain washed by your idiot US government.US has stolen stuff at least as much as China did.
What happens now is the fact that China slowly overtakes US in economy and US can't do much about it other than to complain to China is stealing. No, China has worked its ass off the last decades for your fat ass to have everything in store at dumping prices.
wicketr - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
99% of users don't care about the modding community. Now whether or not OEMs can keep up is another issue.For the most part Mediateks have been going into budget phones where the manufacturer isn't going to spend money on upgrades. So let's wait and see if a flagship device does. If not, then yes, Mediatek has issues.
Alistair - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
I know you wanted the first edgy post (all of which wasn't worth reading) but THANK GOD we've now got a Qualcomm competitor here. This new MediaTek SoC looks awesome, and I want it everywhere. In my cellphone, in a Windows ARM laptop, and in a portable gaming device. Go Taiwan :)iphonebestgamephone - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
You can emulate switch on the arm gamihn device better than x86, thats all there is for arm gaming for modern games.Spunjji - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
It's always sad when your waffle gets in place as the first commentmode_13h - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
> Android barely has any APIs that allow the developers to do somethingReally? Have you heard of NNAPI?
caribbeanblue - Tuesday, November 30, 2021 - link
This is an extremely idiotic comment.ikjadoon - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
The pros:-- Excellent to see such a widely-updated SoC: new cores, big caches, LP5X, ISP leaps, AI. Hopefully, some trickle-down to cheaper SoCs. I didn't even know Bluetooth 5.3 was out yet.
-- Who wouldn't want TSMC N4? Really eager to see power numbers.
-- I like that they're chasing the A15, at least in nT. 1T is also a noticeable win, but such a big discrepancy between SPECint2006 and Geekbench 5.
-- even in the US, the lack of mmWave: good even. It's generally waste of weight + parts + silicon that'll get used maybe twice (2 times) in the five years of ownership, not mentioning ripping through *both* my battery and data cap once I realize I accidentally streamed a 4K video instead of 1080p.
The Cons:
-- Are these performance estimates with Mediatek's SoC benchmark cheating enabled, aka never-available-perf for user applications? Mediatek is notorious for this, "The one big difference here however is that there’s always been somewhat of a firewall in our coverage between what a device vendor did, and what chip vendors enabled them to do, and that’s where we come to MediaTek’s behavior over the last few years. In most past cases we always blamed the device vendors for cheating as it had been their mechanisms and initiative – we hadn’t had evidence of enablement by chipset vendors, at least until now." From: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15703/mobile-benchm...
-- When is Mediatek going to update their Android OS upgrade? Qualcomm recently announced all SD888 vendors would get +3 Android OS updates.
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
Mediatek committing to support at least 3 major Android OS updates would indeed be a major plus. Qualcomm also did so, but rather kicking and screaming.I would actually like to see a statement about whether the SoC and the smartphone maker support at least 3 major Android OS updates or not in every review going forward. Planned obsolescence is one thing in $ 40 streaming sticks, it's a very different story for >= $ 800 devices like the ones this SoC setup will end up in.
nandnandnand - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Bluetooth 5.2 is the big one.