A few years ago, MediaTek decided to leave the high-end mobile device SoC space as it decided to focus on the mid-range and entry level market, but as of today, that is no longer the case. The company has announced its new flagship Dimensity 9000 SoC and it packs all the latest cutting edge mobile SoC features you'd expect to see.

The Dimensity 9000 is based entirely on the new Arm v9 architecture and the chip itself is built in TSMC's 4 nm node, which gives MediaTek a lead on all its competitors, but Apple. As for the Arm cores in question, the main core is a Cortex-X2 at 3.05 GHz, which is accompanied by three Cortex-A710 cores at 2.85 GHz and four power efficient Cortex-A510 cores at 1.8 GHz. All of these new Arm cores were only announced at the end of May this year, so MediaTek has clearly been burning the midnight oil to get the Dimensity 9000 out before its competitors' new chips based on the Arm v9 architecture.The GPU in the Dimensity 9000 is also from Arm, in the shape of the Mali-G710 in an MP10 configuration, which means it has 10 GPU cores. Arm claims a performance improvement of around 20 percent compared to the older Mali-G78 GPU core, so it's unlikely that the Dimensity 9000 will offer the fastest mobile GPU in the market for long, but MediaTek claims its 35 percent faster than other Android flagship phones currently in the market, without going into any details.When it comes to display support, MediaTek seems to have been a little bit conservative, as the highest official resolution supported seems to be WQHD+ or 2960x1440 pixels, albeit at 144 Hz, so it's possible that higher resolutions are supported at lower refresh rates. On the other hand, FHD+ or 2220x1080 would enable 180 Hz support, so we might see some gaming phones based on the Dimensity 9000.

The Dimensity 9000 is also the first mobile phone SoC to support LPDDR5X memory and it does so up to 3,750 MHz or 60 GB/s memory throughput. MediaTek has also outfitted the Dimensity 9000 with 6 MB of system level cache, which is twice that of the Snapdragon 888 series, but 2 MB less than both Samsung's Exynos 2100 and Google's Tensor SoCs. However, the shared L3 CPU cache is twice the previously mentioned mobile SoCs at 8 MB.

Other interesting features of the Dimensity 9000 includes the new Imagiq790 18-bit camera HDR-ISP which is capable of supporting 320 Megapixel sensors, or three 32 Megapixel sensors simultaneously for computational photography. There's also what MediaTek calls a 5th generation, six core APU or Ai processing unit, also known as an NPU to further help with computational photography and it's said to be 16 percent faster than the Google's Tensor chip in some Ai workloads.When it comes to video playback, the Dimensity 9000 is pretty much as cutting edge as it gets, with 8K30p AV1 decoding support, which MediaTek claims as as a first, as well as 8K60p decoding and 8K30p encoding support for H.265/HEVC, H.264 and VP9. However, it's unclear if the Dimensity 9000 can output these types of resolutions to an external display, making support for such resolutions somewhat pointless.

5G support is pretty much given on a high-end mobile SoC these days and although MediaTek didn't implement support for mmWave in the Dimensity 9000, it does support 3GPP release 16, also known as 5G R16 which enables download speeds of up to 7 Gbps on supported networks. There's also support for what is known as UL Tx Switching, which means upload speeds will be faster and MediaTek has tested upload speeds of up to 3.2 Gbps on a Nokia based 5G base station.

Other wireless features include WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 support - which apparently is another world's first in a phone SoC - and Bluetooth LE Audio support for Dual-Link True Wireless stereo audio.

Overall this looks like a very competent mobile SoC and so far it seems like several major mobile phone makers are onboard, so expect devices from Motorola, OnePlus, OPPO, Samsung and Xiaomi, with the first one arriving as early as Q1 next year. Until then we won't really know how the Dimensity 9000 stands up to the competition and although it looks impressive compared to what's currently in the market, we still don't know the full details of what Qualcomm has coming next, nor Samsung or Google for that matter.