MediaTek’s smartphone chips typically play second fiddle to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors, but MediaTek just announced its new flagship Dimensity 9000 system-on-chip, and it features a number of notable firsts.
The Dimensity 9000 is both the first smartphone chip to be built using TSMC’s new 4nm process and the first chip to feature Arm’s new Cortex-X2 CPU core.
The flagship chip is based on the new ArmV9 architecture and will feature the Cortex X2 as an “ultra” performance core, three Cortex-A710 cores as general “super” performance cores, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores. The Dimensity 9000 will support LPDDR5x memory at bandwidths of up to 7,500 Mbps.
The big jumps in performance don’t stop there: The Dimensity 9000 is also the first chip to feature Arm’s Mali G710-MC10 GPU, along with industry-leading support for raytracing via the Vulkan SDK for Android. And while there aren’t any phones currently available that have pushed refresh rates this high, MediaTek claims the Dimensity 9000 can handle screens with up to a 180Hz refresh rate at FHD+ resolutions.