MediaTek today announced its Dimensity family of SoC with 5G support. The new series marks the return of flagship chips from MediaTek that are meant for use in premium and flagship smartphones.
The Dimensity 1000 is the first chip in the Dimensity family. It is a single chip that comes with an integrated 5G modem thereby offering major space and power consumption savings. The chip will be fabricated on the 7nm process node.
The integrated 5G modem inside the Dimensity 1000 is capable of 4.7Gbps downlink speeds and 2.5Gbps uplink speeds over sub-6GHz networks. It is the world"s first chip to support dual 5G networks. Other impressive connectivity specs include support for 5G two carrier aggregation along with multi-mode support meaning it supports all networks ranging from 2G to 5G. The chip also supports Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1+.
Since the Dimensity 1000 only supports sub-6GHz 5G networks, it is primarily meant for smartphones that will launch in Asia. All U.S. operators are rolling out support 5G on the mmWave frequency which the chipset does not support. The company, however, does plan to release new chips with support for mmWave frequency.
On the CPU side, the Dimensity 1000 packs four Cortex-A77 cores running at up to 2.6Ghz. This is paired with four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores clocked at up to 2GHz. The GPU duty is handled by ARM"s Mali-G77 MC9 making the Dimensity 1000 the first chip in the world to debut with it. For AI tasks, there is APU 3.0 -- MediaTek"s AI processing unit -- comprising of six AI processors that offer double the performance of the previous APU and a computing horsepower of offers 4.5 teraflops.
Other notable specs of the Dimensity 1000 include a 5-core ISP that allows for multi-frame video HDR, support for 80MP cameras, and the ability to process streams from multiple cameras at once. The chip does lack support for 108MP camera sensor which Xiaomi recently debuted on the Mi Note 10.
The Dimensity 1000 also supports 2K+ displays with 90Hz refresh rate or FHD+ displays with 120Hz refresh rate. It is the world"s first SoC to support Google"s AV1 format at up to 4k 60fps resolution.
MediaTek expects the first set of smartphones powered by the Dimensity 1000 chip to launch later in 2019 and in the first quarter of 2020.