Last year, OnePlus tried something new with its phone lineup with the launch of the OnePlus Nord, a mid-range smartphone that dropped the Snapdragon 800 series processors in favor of a Snapdragon 765G to be more affordable. A couple more phones were introduced under the Nord branding, but the company always stuck with Qualcomm processors.
That's set to change, though, as OnePlus is reportedly planning to use a MediaTek chipset in the Nord 2, according to a report from Android Central. Not only that, but it seems that OnePlus is opting for the flagship Dimensity 1200 chipset, not a mid-range processor like the Snapdragon 765G.
MediaTek announced the Dimensity 1200 in January, and it has a premium Cortex-A78 core at 3.0GHz, three performance Cortex-A78 cores at 2.6GHz, and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores at 2GHz. It's behind Qualcomm's top-of-the-line offering in some ways, but it's built on a 6nm process, it supports 200MP cameras, 168Hz refresh rates for the display, dual 5G SIM cards, and more - though, of course, that's not saying the Nord 2 will use all of that.
We have yet to see the Dimensity 1200 chipset show up on any phones, and that's because it's not planned to be available until the second quarter of the year, which is when the Nord 2 is expected to be announced. While we don't have benchmarks or real-world tests to say just how much more powerful the phone will be, it's fair to expect a significant upgrade from the original Nord.
