MediaTek announces Dimensity 9000 5G chipset on 4nm process

2021-11-18

During MediaTek’s ongoing Summit conference taking place over the next couple of days, the Taiwan-based chip maker is announcing its latest 5G chipset called the Dimensity 9000. It’s the world’s first TSMC chip built on the 4nm process - which should improve performance while improving power efficiency. The new sub-6GHz 5G chipset is the first smartphone chip to use a Cortex-X2 core clocked at up to 3.05Ghz and is the world's-first smartphone chip to include Bluetooth 5.3.

The SoC is arranged in a 1+3+4 setup. In addition to that single Cortex-X2 “ultra core”, it has a cluster of 3X “super cores” Cortex-A710 clocked at up to 2.85Ghz, and a cluster of 4 efficiency Cortex A510 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz. The chipset will support LPDDR5x RAM speeds of up to 7500Mbps in smartphones. It also has 14MB of cache, which Mediatek says improves performance by 7% and bandwidth consumption by 25% versus just 8MB of cache. In preliminary Geekbench performance, the Dimensity 9000 surpassed scores of the “Android flagship” (perhaps the Snapdragon 888) and scored similar to the “2021 flagship” which indirectly meant Apple’s latest A15 Bionic.

For graphics, there’s a new Mali-G710 GPU with 10-cores. There’s a new raytracing SDK for developers to bring new visual improvements to get closer to PC-level graphics performance.

There’s some updated connectivity with Bluetooth 5.3 for the first time on smartphone chips. It also supports Wi-Fi 6E 2x2, is Bluetooth Audio LE-ready with “Dual-Link True Wireless Stereo Audio, and it supports a new Beidou III-B1C GNSS standard.

The Dimensity 9000’s ISP (Image Signal Processor) can theoretically capture 4K HDR video from three cameras simultaneously. MediaTek explains that by capturing three exposures simultaneously from three cameras, each one going through one of three ISPs, it can process a total of 270 frames per second to output 18-bit 4K HDR video. The ISP also supports camera sensors of up to 320MP.

The 5G modem complies with the 3GPP Release-16 standard. Although still no mmWave this time around, this modem supports sub-6Ghz 5G with theoretical max download speeds of 7Gbps with 3CC Carrier Aggregation (300Mhz). This is also the only 5G smartphone modem to support R16 UL Tx Switching for both SUL and NR UL-CA based connections. The modem also brings improved power consumption for both active and standby 5G connections.

The new APU (AI Processing Unit) supports up to 4X better performance versus the previous generation, and leads performance on ETHZ, an AI benchmark test. MediaTek claims the Dimensity 9000 outperforms the Google Tensor by 16% in AI performance.

MediaTek says the first smartphones running the Dimensity 9000 will be arriving in late Q1 globally.