Mats Hellqvist
MediaTek is currently holding its annual conference. The Taiwanese chip manufacturer will be presenting a real highlight at the event over the next few days: the new Dimensity 9000 5G chipset is in the starting blocks. The Dimensity 9000 5G is the world’s first TSMC chip based on a 4 Nm process. The sub-6 GHz 5G chipset is also the first smartphone SoC with a 3.05 GHz Cortex-X2 core. Another worlds first is the latest Bluetooth 5.3 standard.
The individual cores are arranged in a 1+3+4 setup. In addition to the Cortex-X2 Prime core, the Dimensity 9000 features a cluster of three Cortex-A710 cores clocked at up to 2.85 GHz and four efficient Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz. The chipset supports LPDDR5x RAM with transfer rates of up to 7,500 Mbps. 8 MB of L3 cache plus 6 MB of system cache are on board, which according to Mediatek improves performance by 7% and bandwidth by 25% over a simple 8 MB cache. In the first benchmark tests, the chipset beat every chipset that was not produced by Apple. And was the first Android chipset to break the 1 million point barrier at AnTuTu.
10 core Mali G710 GPU
A new graphics chip is of course also on board. The Mali G710 GPU has 10 cores and comes with a new ray tracing SDK. In addition, the Dimensity 9000 5G is the first smartphone chipset to support Bluetooth 5.3. Wi-Fi 6E 2×2, Bluetooth audio LE-ready with dual-link true wireless stereo audio and the new GPS standard Beidou III-B1C GNSS are also integrated.
The Dimensity 9000’s ISP (Image Signal Processor) can theoretically record 4K HDR video from three cameras simultaneously. MediaTek explains that the parallel streams from three cameras, each passing through one of three ISPs, can process a total of 270 frames per second. This allows 18-bit 4K HDR videos to be output. For still images, the image processor supports camera sensors with up to 320 megapixels.
The 5G modem complies with the 3GPP Release 16 standard. mmWave is still not supported. For this, the modem works with sub-6Ghz 5G, which in theory can achieve maximum download speeds of 7 Gbps with 3CC carrier aggregation (300 Mhz). At the same time, power consumption is said to have improved both with active 5G connections and in standby.
The new APU (AI Processing Unit) is said to be four times more powerful than the previous generation. According to MediaTek, the Dimensity 9000 is 16% faster than Google’s Tensor in AI benchmarks. The first Dimensity 9000 smartphones will be launched worldwide at the end of the first quarter of 2022.
