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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UNLK A6 - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
To see the original slides, they're still at 9to5google.com. Search for "Dimensity 9000".UNLK A6 - Tuesday, November 23, 2021 - link
...And notice they credit AnandTech for those images. What the heck AnandTech, how about a remark someplace that you changed the article!Frenetic Pony - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
Damn, that entire camera isp section was about as useless as most camera numbers are in phones these days. "200mp, 18bit, 200 gigapixels-" shut up, your tech is wasted, why are you advertising it to people that should know better?arayoflight - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
200MP capture pipeline also means that you can do 17 frames of 12MP for better HDR stacking and merging.A more competent ISP benefits even lower resolution sensors.
Also simultaneous capture of multiple 4k streams is great as it will allow for smooth switching of cameras during capture. Currently only iPhone can do that.
hanselltc - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Nice claims and nice specs, but we'll have to see where they end up and how they actually perform.The D1000-1200 chips also had rather nice specs, but other than Nord 2 they were basically china exclusives.
On the A15 review's performance/energy chart D1200 basically got bodied by 865, and then there's apple doing 3 quarters of its middle core's performance on blizzards with half energy.
Huawei cranked Kirin 9000 out with Arm Holdings IP for the CPU/GPU and had them actually trashing everything android while going at apple for GPU. A year later this thing calls itself 9000 again, lets see if it performs.
dotjaz - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
That's definitely not how it works. The pipeline is 9GPix/s. It has nothing to do with the maximum resolution. That 320MP is likely not zero-lag and lacking a lot of processing. That's why triple camera only have less than 1/3 the total pixel counts.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, November 18, 2021 - link
On another note, Samsung's fabs better have an answer for this N4 node from TSMC soon, or Qualcomm might rethink their choice of foundry quite quickly. Plus, NVIDIA isn't too pleased with the efficiency (lack thereof) of Samsung's N8 process. But for now, both QC and NVIDIA might be stuck with Samsung, as TSMC seems to be quite booked for now, and not just on their advanced EUV (N5, N4) nodes.dotjaz - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Nvidia chose an old node that was never claimed to be as efficient. Why would Nvidia blame Samsung for it?You don't even know the actual name of the node, it's 8N. So I suggest you shut up until you get your facts right.
Kangal - Friday, November 19, 2021 - link
Excluding the questionable SMIC offerings, Samsung actually proposes the best performance per dollar lithography. And they deliver too.TSMC is pricey stuff. Part of that is the stable revenue stream that came from AMD and the consoles, allowing them to expand their R&D budget.
The truth is, the Kirin 9000 doesn't matter, and neither does the Dimensity 9000. They hardly ever make any supplies of it. I'd rather a "Good SoC" working on my phone, rather than a "Great SoC" which is almost vaporware/paper-launch.
vladx - Saturday, November 20, 2021 - link
Vaporware my ass, here writing to you from a Mate 40 running on a Kirin 9000E. People here in EU are not brainwashed to get our phones straight from carriers, we can actually think for ourselves and buy from stores which doesn't limit your options to a couple of phone models only.