Dimensity 9000 takes on Apple A15 Bionic, Snapdragon 888 successor

MediaTek's Dimensity 1200 chip paved the way for reasonably priced high performance Android smartphones this year and going into 2022, MediaTek is trying to eye the market share of the Snapdragon 888 successor. The Dimensity 9000 is MediaTek's flagship chip for 2022, boasting of all the top-notch specs and features.

Based on the specs that MediaTek has released, the Dimensity 9000 is true flagship-grade chip, with the latest Cortex-X2 cores and the new 4nm manufacturing process. Phones with the Dimensity 9000 are expected to reach consumers by end March 2021.

Dimensity 9000 is a proper high-end chipset

MediaTek hasn't spared any of the specs and features this time. The Dimensity 9000 is a 4nm chip and its processor has its cores arranged in the 1 + 3 + 4 configuration. There is a 3.05GHz Cortex-X2 core for the primary performance core, three Cortex-A710 cores clocked at 2.8GHz, and four power efficient Cortex-A510 cores clocked at 1.8GHz.

The AI processing unit is said to offer a 16 percent boost in performance over the recently announced Google Tensor chip.

The SoC has 14MB cache and support for LPDDR5X RAM, all of which go on to make this chip more powerful than “current Android flagships” and on par with a “2021 flagship chip" on synthetic benchmark platforms.

MediaTek has given the Dimensity 9000 a Mali-G710 GPU with 10-cores, which also brings a ray tracing SDK for developers to improve graphics on apps and games. The onboard ISP can support 4K HDR video from three cameras simultaneously. Also, it can support up to 320MP camera sensors!

Along with Bluetooth 5.3, the Dimensity 9000 features Wi-Fi 6E 2x2, Bluetooth Audio LE-ready with Dual-Link True Wireless Stereo Audio, and Beidou III-B1C GNSS standard support.

There's support for 5G networks obviously but only for sub-6GHz 5G networks, which means speeds are limited to 7Gbps. There's 3CC Carrier Aggregation preset as well.

What remains to be seen is how smartphone brands go about with the chipset choice this year. The Dimensity 9000 is expected to go up against the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip. Will we see smartphone brands opting for the Dimensity 9000 in top-tier flagships instead of the Snapdragon 888 sucessor?