Qualcomm and MediaTek announce new chips for next year’s flagships

Two of the world’s biggest System on Chip (SoC) makers, Qualcomm and MediaTek, have announced the next iterations of their flagship mobile chipsets – the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the Dimensity 9200 respectively. Naturally, they’ll be competing with each other.

Round 1, fight

In Qualcomm’s camp, the CPU part of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 – Qualcomm calls this the Kryo CPU – uses the 1+4+3 core design. It will feature one prime Arm Cortex-X3 core clocked at 3.2GHz. That’s joined by four performance cores at 2.8GHz, and three efficiency cores at 2.0GHz. An improvement of around 200-300MHz across all cores over the SD 8 Gen 1. The company has also managed to make its chip 40% more efficient.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9200 sticks to a standard 1+3+4 core design. There’s one prime Arm Cortex-X3 core clocked at a slightly lower 3.05GHz, three performance cores at 2.8GHz, and four efficiency cores at 1.8GHz. The company says this will provide a single-core performance improvement of 12% and improve multicore performance by 10%.

Both chip makers are offering improvements to WiFi and 5G. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and the Dimensity 9200 will offer support for the still-to-be-finalised WiFi 7 standard. That might sound cool but you’ll still need to wait for hardware manufacturers to launch compatible devices before the presumably higher transfer speeds can be realised.

The new Dimensity chip is the first from the company to add integrated Sub-6 and mmWave 5G support. This means we could see more internationally available smartphones launch with the chip. Qualcomm already supports both 5G bands but the SD 8 Gen 2 will support dual 5G SIM cards.

Ray tracing in your pocket

Both SoCs will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing in some form. Qualcomm reckons its in-house Adreno GPU will be 25% faster and 45% more efficient than its previous offering.

MediaTek doesn’t develop GPUs internally. Instead, the new Dimensity chip will use Arm’s Immortalis GPU to provide glorious real-time rendered rays to your screen. All that with a 32% improvement in graphical performance over the Dimensity 9000 at the same power consumption.

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Both the SD 8 Gen 2 and Dimensity 9200 will offer better memory and storage performance with LPDDR5X and UFS 4.0 support. But that will depend on device manufacturers actually using the newer (and probably more expensive) components in their devices.

It’s still too early to know exactly how well the new chips will perform and how they’ll compare to previous chips, including Apple’s A16. It’s unlikely either will dislodge Apple from the top spot.

Luckily, we shouldn’t have to wait too long to find out. Qualcomm says the first devices sporting an SD 8 Gen 2 will turn up before the end of the year. There have been murmurs that Samsung’s next range of flagships will use Snapdragon chips exclusively. But the Korean manufacturer was curiously absent from the list of partners.

With MediaTek, things are just as murky. There are rumours that the Vivo X90 series and Oppo’s Find X6 could be among the first to ship with a Dimensity 9200. But those launches will likely be confined to China, at least at first.

According to a Tech Adviser report, Eric Fisher, MediaTek’s vice president and general manager of corporate sales, said Dimensity 9200 flagships will ship to Europe in 2023 but didn’t say when exactly.

Source: The Verge