Source: Andrew Martonik / Android Central
What you need to know
- The new Dimensity 1000 SoC is built on a 7nm process with 4x Cortex-A77 cores and impressive specs.
- Integrated Sub-6 5G modem provides high speeds and power saving, with dual-SIM and carrier aggregation.
- Devices with the Dimensity 1000 will begin hitting the market in late 2019, with wide rollout through 2020.
MediaTek is debuting its latest round of mobile SoCs, but this is a bigtime announcement: it's the companies first set of 5G-enabled chips, which will carry the brand name "Dimensity." The first of the bunch is a high-end platform, the Dimensity 1000, that integrates all of the company's latest tech and on-board 5G networking.
These are really impressive specs that put the Dimensity 1000 in the top tier.
The general layout of the SoC is four ARM Cortex-A77 cores at 2.6GHz, along with four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores at 2Ghz, on a 7nm process. More importantly it has MediaTek's latest ISP and APU for advanced camera and AI processing — it supports up to 80MP cameras, 40k60 video, and dramatically faster processing for digital zoom, video segmentation, object recognition and voice processing. It also supports QHD+ displays at 90Hz (or FHD+ at 120Hz), as well as 16GB of LPDD4x RAM, with promises of enhanced gaming using its HyperEngine 2.0 platform — but we'll have to wait and see that for ourselves.
What's MediaTek? The processor running your Amazon Echo, and probably much of your smart home
As for the networking side of the equation, this is MediaTek's first SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It's Sub-6 only at the moment, which makes sense in terms of useful deployments worldwide and the complexity of the system, but there will be a mmWave version coming later. MediaTek claims it's the fastest Sub-6 SoC available right now, with twice the download speeds of the Snapdragon 855 with an X50 modem, while using over 40% less power. But we'll see what Qualcomm has to say about that, considering its latest round of SoC launches is coming soon.
Skipping mmWave for now has provided a great-looking Sub-6 implementation.
There are also a couple extras and firsts for MediaTek in the 5G space. The Dimensity 1000 supports dual-SIM dual-standby 5G, as well as 2x carrier aggregation for 5G networks — the latter of which being more important for situations of overlapping coverage from different parts of a carrier's Sub-6 network. It's also set up to work with both stand alone and non-stand alone Sub-6 networks. And elsewhere in wireless there's of course Wi-Fi 6 support as well as Bluetooth 5.1.
MediaTek says partner devices launching with the new SoC will start to hit the market at the end of 2019, but broad expansion will take place in Q1 2020 with U.S. and Europe launching in the second half of 2020. While it's unlikely to garner anywhere near the same sort of pull as Qualcomm's competing SoCs, it's incredibly important that MediaTek has a comparable 5G-enabled SoC on the market to give companies another choice as we push into the 5G era.
Press release:

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