MediaTek is getting ready to say the F-word

The Dimensity 9000 is a "Flagship" chipset

Today MediaTek announced its new Dimensity 9000 chipset — a chip with a handful of firsts, not just for the company but for smartphones in general. It’s going to be a 4nm TSMC-made smartphone SoC with the new ARM X2 big core, G710 MP10 GPU, a ton of CPU cache, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and lofty promises. In fact, MediaTek spent half of today bragging that it was ready to drop an F-bomb: "Flagship." But is the chipset really flagship-ready — and are we ready for a MediaTek-based flagship?

(Full disclosure: MediaTek flew me and a few dozen other journalists and analysts out to California, stuffing us full of coffee and snacks as it presented its roadmap for the next year and bragged about its accomplishments. I spent most of the time tweeting jokes.)

First, a necessary context dump. Here's a high-level overview of the upcoming Dimensity 9000:

• 1x Cortex X2 + 3x A710 + 4x A510 — the latest reference ARM cores
• TSMC 4nm node
• 8MB L3 cache plus 6MB "system-level cache" — that's 14MB in total and quite a lot
• Mali G710 MP10 GPU — MediaTek talks about ray tracing, but it's software, not hardware
• LPDDR5X RAM
• Triple 18-bit ISP w/ 9 gigapixel throughput supporting up to 320MP cameras — numbers that big sound ridiculous, but we're getting there
• 4+2 core APU — MediaTek claims Tensor-level AI performance
• Wi-Fi 6E w/ 160MHz channels
• Bluetooth 5.3
• Release 16 5G modem W/ 3CC aggregation (300MHz, up to 7Gbps down in a lab), R16 UL (that means faster performance with a weaker signal), and no mmWave
• AV1 decode at 8K, but no encode
• Devices as soon as Q1 2022, but not in the US

If some of these details sound entirely new to you, that's understandable as MediaTek is packing a lot of new technologies into this chipset. All three cores used in the Dimensity 9000 were only announced this year, and MediaTek has even beaten Qualcomm to revealing hardware that includes them. We're honestly not used to MediaTek being on the bleeding edge like this, but I guess we should have expected it with the slow change in direction over the last two years.

At today's event, MediaTek's Kevin Keating (GM Global Marketing & Communications) repeatedly quiped that we would hear the F-word during the day's presentations — a joke my editor would prefer that I not spell out. It was said in jest, but there is some ironic and historical truth to it: Not that long ago, MediaTek really was a dirty word for smartphone enthusiasts. The company's inroads into the mobile space were made through entry-level price points, and its chips really only appeared in cheap phones for years. While customers were ogling the highest-end and fastest hardware with the latest and greatest features, "MediaTek" was an eight-letter word for "bad."

That's an association many of our readers may still have, partly due to market. Although MediaTek's recent chips are objectively pretty decent, the higher-end hardware is mostly limited to markets like Asia and Europe. The company only expects to capture something like 20% of the North American market by the end of the year — and that would be an increase, in fact. A big chunk of that has to do with how captive the US market has become: Our carriers are all-in on mmWave while the rest of the world doesn't care a whole lot, and MediaTek's been focusing more on sub-6GHz 5G. This focus on mmWave 5G essentially demanded that high-end phones here in the US use Qualcomm's hardware. The fact that Google's Pixel 6 series uses a Samsung-made modem for use on US mmWave 5G networks was even a little surprising, but it opens the gates: "Flagship" doesn't have to mean "Qualcomm-powered" in the US anymore.

That brings us back to MediaTek. The Dimensity 9000 isn't the first time the company has said it's making a flagship-grade chipset. In 2019 we were told the same thing about the Dimensity 1000. A tweaked version of that, the Dimensity 1000C, did land in the US in the LG Velvet, but the inflated $588 still wasn't precisely "flagship," and the phone did not compete with higher-end options. Admittedly, "flagship" means different things to different people, but none of MediaTek's smartphone chips have met that grade for us yet. The question is: Will the Dimensity 9000 be any different?

For other markets, like Europe, I think the answer might actually be "yes." I'm still sure Qualcomm's upcoming hardware will still beat what MediaTek has announced today in many ways, but it sounds like MediaTek is in the ballpark now. Google's Tensor has already proven that you don't need to be the very best in every single artificial benchmark to offer a flagship-grade experience. It's a neck-of-the-woods metric, and customers really don't care if a handful of workloads take a few milliseconds longer than some other chipset if general performance is still great. Other hardware like the display, storage speeds, and camera may even be more important to customers as far as the whole-phone holistic experience goes.

But however great the Dimensity 9000 might be, it probably won't make the "flagship" grade here in the US, and that's because of mmWave. The technology honestly isn't that useful for most customers, but carriers here are all-in on it, and carriers drive the US smartphone retail market. Our readers buck the trend, buying more of their phones outright rather than through their service provider, but we're a special bunch. The folks that don't know much about smartphones outside the geebees and the weefees don't know the difference between a bootloader unlock and a carrier unlock, and they're getting their phones postpaid and on-contract from big red, the blue ball, and team magenta. And because the carriers (and especially Verizon) care about mmWave to market 5G, they probably won't be very interested in selling a "flagship" phone that doesn't have it. We might see one (maybe T-Mobile) not stick to that formula, but there aren't any guarantees.

"Flagship" means a lot of things, but here in the US, it's a label that will probably outright exclude the Dimensity 9000. But neither you nor MediaTek should be disappointed about that. This chip looks great, and nothing is stopping MediaTek from coming up with a different version of it that US carriers can get excited about. As it stands, though, we probably won't see the Dimensity 9000 replacing the next Snapdragon in in 2022's US flagships.

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