MediaTek has announced its flagship chipset series, Dimensity. With the first installment, the Taiwanese chipmaker has introduced its first 5G-capable Dimensity 1000. What the announcement actually has is to tell the name for its new lineup. The company had previously announced about such a chip in May 2019 — the 5G chip with the latest Cortex A77 CPU and Mali-G77 GPU.
Well, it’s a return of the company in the flagship market. Previously the company offered Helio X10 and Helio X20 followed by Helio X30. The first two could never compete with Qualcomm rivals, where the third one couldn’t even attract enough OEMs. So the company stopped making more of them. However, now it seems to be coming back with a bang with the high-end chips under the new brand name “Dimensity”.
Dimensity – The Name
Here is what the president of the silicon maker, Joe Chen, has to say about the new brand name.
“We chose the name Dimensity to highlight how our 5G solutions are driving new waves of innovation and experiences, much like the fabled fifth dimension. Our first announced chip, MediaTek Dimensity 1000, gives consumers a significantly faster, more intelligent and all-around incredible mobile experience.”
“Our Dimensity series is a culmination of MediaTek’s investment in 5G and positions us as a leader driving 5G development and innovation. Our 5G technology goes head-to-head with anyone in the industry,” said MediaTek President Joe Chen.
CPU, GPU, APU and Memory
MediaTek announced the Helio G90 and G90T in July 2019 with 2+6 core-configuration of Cortex A76 and Cortex A55. In the Dimensity 1000 (let’s make it short, D1000) chip, the company has brought four ARM’s latest Cortex-A77 and four Cortex-A55.
More interestingly, the high-performance “Big” cores are clocked at 2.6GHz. The four Cortex-A55 efficient “Little” cores remain at 2.0GHz where we usually see it. This can indeed get on par with rival high-end chipsets where Huawei’s Kirin 990 comes with Cortex-A76 clocked at 2×2.86GHz and 2×2.09Ghz. Samsung’s Exynos 990, on the other hand, has two big custom cores with 2xA76 and 4xA55. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 has 1+3+4 Kryo-485 core configuration clocked at up to 2.84GHz. The new D1000, with complete four big cores clocked at 2.6GHz, is rightly built with 7nm process.
On the graphics side, MediaTek is using Mali-G77 as it’s already shipped with Exynos 990. Unlike the 11-core GPU in Samsung’s variant, the MediaTek’s Dimensity has 9 cores.
The third one is the onboard 3rd-generation AI Processing Unit (APU 3.0). The company has mentioned that the new APU will offer more than double the performance of its previous generation APU.
Lastly, the new D1000 will support 4-channel LPDDR4X RAM with up to 16GB of memory.
Camera and Graphics Performance
The Dimensity 1000 comes with the world’s first 5-core image signal processor. Combined with the company’s proprietary Imagiq+ technology, the new ISP supports camera image sensors with resolutions of up to 80-megapixel at 24 frames per second or 32MP+16MP sensors with multi-camera setups.
The chip supports hardware media encoding and decoding up to 4K 60fps. While it supports H264 and H265/HEVC encoding/decoding, the new D1000 becomes the world’s first system-on-chip to support Google’s AV1 decoding in addition to VP-9.
The new D100 chip supports FullHD+ display resolution at up to 120Hz, while the 2K+ resolution will max out at 90Hz.
5G Connectivity
Most importantly, the Dimensity 1000 comes head-to-head among the competition with its connectivity support. The D1000 has an integrated 5G modem and according to the company it delivers up to 49% power saving compared to the competitors’ solutions.
It’s the first Sub-6GHz 5G modem with the support of two carrier aggregation (2CC CA), integrated on to SoC. The D1000’s 5G modem supports up to 4.7Gbps downlink and 2.5Gbps uplink speed over Sub-6GHz networks.
