In brief: MediaTek wants back in the high-end mobile SoC game, and its latest Dimensity chipset packs a lot of improvements designed to make it more competitive confronting Qualcomm and Samsung's best offerings. The get-go devices sporting the new chip will arrive in the outset half of 2022, so it won't be long before we'll run into if they are flagship textile.

Over the past two years, MediaTek has been trying to intermission into the high stop smartphone space with mobile chipsets that it said would rival Qualcomm'south Snapdragon 8xx series and Samsung'due south flagship Exynos offerings. The Dimensity 1000, 1100, and 1200 chipsets delivered plenty of performance and prissy-to-have features like 5G connectivity, AV1 hardware decode, and back up for high refresh charge per unit displays. However, manufacturers have only adopted them for their mid-range phones similar the OnePlus Nord ii 5G and the OnePlus 11T.

The Taiwanese company is at present marching forward with the announcement of its Dimensity 9000 chipset that has the potential to exist a potent competitor for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 898 and the Samsung Exynos 2200 chipsets that are expected to suspension cover next year.

MediaTek says the new SoC will be built on TSMC'south iv nm procedure node, and that lonely should bring some much-needed performance and efficiency improvements over previous Dimensity chipsets. The company has also opted for a CPU configuration that is similar to what its competitors are using in their upcoming SoCs. That means the new Dimensity bit will integrate a tri-cluster with one Arm Cortex-X2 "super" core, 3 high-performance Cortex-A710 cores, and 4 power-efficient Cortex-A510 cores.

The Cortex-X2 CPU core is supposedly 35 percent faster and 37 percentage more free energy-efficient than a Cortex-X1 core, and MediaTek is also touting eight megabytes of L3 cache and vi megabytes of system-level cache (SLC). For reference, Qualcomm'due south Snapdragon 888 SoC has four megabytes of L3 cache and 3 megabytes of SLC. Manufacturers volition exist able to pair the Dimensity 9000 with LPDDR5X memory working at upward to 7,500 Mbps, which is also a pleasant surprise from MediaTek.

The Dimensity 9000 besides integrates a ten-core Mali-G710 GPU, which is Arm's latest and greatest implementation with a 35 percent operation boost and 60 percent higher energy efficiency when compared to the Snapdragon 888. It's worth noting this is a comparison between a 4 nm role and a 5 nm one, then the real examination will be confronting iv nm chipsets from Samsung and Qualcomm that take yet to be announced.

Finbarr Moynihan, MediaTek'southward vice-president and full general management of marketing, explained the new GPU will also support software-based ray tracing, also as ray tracing via Vulkan for Android. Machine learning tasks volition also be much faster on the new chipset, with 5 times the functioning of free energy efficiency that are possible with the Dimensity 1200.

Another surface area that's been improved is multimedia back up, with a new Imagiq 790 signal processor that has double the processing power of its predecessor. Information technology supports upward to a single 320-megapixel sensor, or upward to a triple 32-megapixel camera setup. On top of the video recording capabilities afforded past the Dimensity 1200, the Dimensity 9000 supports recording 8K 24fps video, or up to three simultaneous 4K HDR streams.

In terms of connectivity, the Dimensity 9000 only supports sub-6GHz 5G, but MediaTek says it's enough to reach download speeds of upwardly to 7 Gbps using 3CC carrier aggregation. The new modem implementation should also offer improved battery life, which is currently more useful than mmWave support for everyone that doesn't live in the US. Other notable features are back up for Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi 6E, and complete GNSS navigation.

As for when we can expect to see the first devices featuring the new scrap, MediaTek says some of its partners are aiming for a late Q1, early on Q2 2022 launch window. The company has been slowly eating away Qualcomm's share of the mobile chipset market, and it will be interesting to see if information technology can go along to do and so with higher-end offerings.