MediaTek drops mid-range Dimensity 7200, first phones due in March

MediaTek has unveiled the Dimensity 7200, a new mid-range phone chipset intended to directly rival Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. 

The 7200 is the first in the company’s new 7000-series, sitting below the recent Dimensity 9200 and 8200 chips. 

It still bears a lot in common with its big brothers though. For starters, it’s fabricated on the same 2nd-generation TSMC 4nm process as the top-tier Dimensity 9200, which should help ensure both power and efficiency. 

The CPU design is pretty different however. There’s no super-fast prime core here: instead there are two Cortex-A715 performance cores clocked at 2.8GHz, flanked by six slower Cortex-A510 efficiency cores. 

That means this won’t deliver the same pure performance as MediaTek’s more premium silicon, though the company is bullish about its competitiveness, claiming it can deliver 10% superior single-core performance to the rival Snapdragon 7 Gen 1. 

The chip includes a modem for 5G support, though it’s limited to Sub-6GHz bandwidths – the typical range outside the US. The latest Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 standards are included at least. 

MediaTek has been slow to adopt the faster but shorter-range mmWave, which is currently only widely available in the States, though does now include that support on its flagship chips. It still ships the majority of its chips to Chinese manufacturers, for release across Asia and Europe, so it’s understandable that the 7200 doesn’t seem to have a US focus. 

Otherwise it’s the usual tech spec-heavy boasts that we can’t put to the test until we get a Dimensity 7200-powered phone in to review.  

You can expect a Mali G610 GPU, with the company’s HyperEngine 5.0 tech to help optimise gaming performance. It can power displays up to 144Hz at Full HD+ resolutions, with HDR support to boot. A dedicated AI processor will help with photography and other machine learning-heavy processes. 

Cameras up to 200Mp will be supported – as seen recently on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – along with 14-bit 4K HDR video capture. 

So when will we actually see this in phones? MediaTek says hardware is in production now, with the first handsets expected by the end of March – meaning we might even see some revealed at this month’s MWC trade show in Barcelona.