With the Dimensity 9000 MediaTek has paved the way for a fight on equal terms with Qualcomm. Power, however, will not be cheap
The days when MediaTek was labeled by some as a company that preferred quantity to quality seem long gone. It must be said, however, that MediaTek's initial approach to the chip segment exposed it to easy criticism: there were so many chips, and only a few were able to match the performance of the best-known competition. That is, Qualcomm's.
So, for some time, MediaTek reduced its presence in the West to focus only on certain markets. Few could have foreseen that the company was only gathering "the energies" for a comeback with different clothes, which took shape with the new line of Dimensity chips that immediately showed how the new MediaTek was a distant relative of the company of the past. The Dimensity 1200, for example, showed off immediately on the excellent OnePlus Nord 2, and the latest MediaTek Dimensity 9000 in early tests showed it could challenge Qualcomm's technical leadership.
MediaTek Dimensity 9000 as the best
The Dimensity 9000 has been announced as a flagship chip in its own right, thus able to compete on equal terms with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip or Apple's A15 Bionic in terms of "brute" power and with Google's refined Tensor when it comes to processing for artificial intelligence.
There are no figures, but there is no doubt that such a project has cost MediaTek investments in research and development with many zeros, investments that somehow must produce an economic return. Consequently, according to the information filtering from the well-informed, MediaTek in a more than understandable would have raised prices than in the past.
If the Dimensity 9000 were to demonstrate on the field the numbers that has shown in some tests, and should show a trade-off between performance and power consumption, would challenge on equal terms the best proposals on the market as Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, Samsung Exynos 2200 and Apple A15 Bionic, so it could not cost much less than competitors.
Dimensity 9000 costs twice as much as before
According to rumors, the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 would cost smartphone makers almost twice as much as the Dimensity 1200, one of the very first SoCs with which the company ushered in the "new course". In recent times, the latter ended up equipping mid-range smartphones such as the aforementioned OnePlus Nord 2 or Xiaomi 11T, but the same fate - for a trivial economic discourse - should not affect the Dimensity 9000.
Despite the almost double cost compared to its younger brother, those who are informed about the matter report that the Dimensity 9000 will cost less than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 that will be presented tomorrow, so despite the performance that seems to put the two on the same level, MediaTek would have managed to reserve a small advantage over Qualcomm. And who knows that the Dimensity 9000 could not have already in 2022 a spread equal to that of the most renowned rival.