MediaTek benchmarks the Dimensity 9000: faster CPU than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, slower GPU

2021-12-17

MediaTek has gotten bold – it published a video showing a Dimensity 9000-powered device running various popular benchmarks, throwing the gauntlet at Qualcomm. Long story short, the Dimensity wins the CPU battle, but loses the GPU battle. The margins are pretty slim in both cases, though.

The video kicks off with AnTuTu (v9.0.7) and the MediaTek chipset posted a score of 1,017,488. We knew pretty early on that the chip will break the 1 million points barrier, but so did the Snapdragon. The Realme GT2 Pro also ran AnTuTu, but that was weeks ago so it may have been an older version, making the score breakdown not comparable head to head.

Next up comes Geekbench where the Dimensity scored 1,273 in the single-core and 4,324 in the multi-core tests. The Snapdragon scores from a Galaxy S22 Ultra/Note with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 are 1,219 and 3,154. A Galaxy Tab S8+ also scored in the low 3,000s, though there have been higher multi-core results from the 8 Gen 1 (but still below the 4,000 mark).

Why is that? Well, let’s look at the CPU clock speeds per core. The Dimensity 9000 runs its Cortex-X2 at 3.05 GHz, the three Cortex-A710 cores at 2.85 GHz and the four A510 cores at 1.8 GHz. For the Snapdragon, it’s X2 at 3.0 GHz, A710 at 2.5 GHz and A510 at 1.8 GHz. So, it appears that the difference in performance stems from the middle cluster.

Moving on to the GPU, the MediaTek chip managed 238 fps in the GFXBenc v3.0 Manhattan test, while the Snapdragon topped the Apple A15 in this test with a score of 267 fps. Version 3.1 of the Manhattan test saw the Dimensity scoring 162 fps and the Snapdragon 176 fps.

Moving on to 1440p resolution with the Aztec test, the Dimensity did 43 fps with the Vulkan backend and 42 fps with OpenGL, while the Snapdragon scored 49 fps and 43 fps, respectively.

A few other scores – the Dimensity 9000 got 17,573 in PCMark and 1,024 in ETHZ AI Benchmark (v5). We don’t have scores from the Snapdragon corner, so we can’t compare them. Another AI benchmark suggests that the Dimensity will win, however.

Here’s the benchmark video. By the way, these are running on a real device, you can see it move slightly between the shots of different benchmarks (as someone had to hit “go” on the various benchmarks). Also, these benchmarks don’t test sustained performance, so that is another thing we want to try out when we get our hands on the first next generation flagships.

Source 1 (in Chinese) | Source 2