MediaTek announces high-end Dimensity 9000-4nm soc with Cortex X2 core

MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9000 soc, the first mobile soc to use TSMC’s 4nm process and the first soc to use Arm’s new cores, including the Cortex X2 core. At the beginning of next year, the first smartphones with the soc should appear.

The Dimensity 9000-soc will get eight cores, all of which are based on Arm’s new designs, writes Android Police, among others. This makes it the first mobile SOC to be equipped with these new cores. The soc will get one Cortex X2 core with a maximum clock speed of 3.05GHz, three A710 cores at 2.85GHz and four A510 cores at 1.8GHz. The CPU also gets 8MB-L3 cache and 6MB-system-level cache.

The GPU is also new; MediaTek will use Arm’s Mali G710 MC10 GPU for this, the top model in Arm’s series. According to AnandTech, it has a clock speed of about 850MHz. The soc also supports Lpddr5 and Lpddr5x memory, whereby up to four channels can be used with up to 3750MHz. The apu to perform AI tasks has four Performance cores and two Flexible cores.

MediaTek’s new soc supports cameras with up to 320-megapixel sensors and 4K HDR videos. Furthermore, the soc can handle screens with a resolution of 2960×1440 with 144Hz, or 2160×1440 pixels with 180Hz. In terms of connectivity, the Dimensity 9000 supports Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. The soc will also get 5G support, but will not support mmWave frequencies.

The first smartphones with the new soc should appear in the first quarter of next year. It is not known which smartphones this will be. Qualcomm is expected to announce its successor to the Snapdragon 888 soc with the Armv9 cores at the end of this month.