MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9200+, the company’s latest high-end smartphone chipset based on a 4nm process.
Designed to compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 series chips that are included in many premium Android phones, the 9200+ has a higher clock speed than the older 9200 at 3.35GHz.
This is a higher potential speed than the 3.2GHz of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, found in phones such as the OnePlus 11, and is just about level with the 3.36GHz overclocked 8 Gen 2 version in the Samsung Galaxy S23 series.
The 9200+ has one prime core Arm Cortex-X3 that can hit that 3.35GHz speed, with three Cortex-A715 performance cores that can run at 3.0GHz, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores that can go to 2.0GHz.
It uses the same Arm Immortalis-G715 GPU as the 9200, but MediaTek says it has given the component a 17% boost in the 9200+.
It also has features geared towards powering phones at the top end of the market with better photography, display specs, and battery life.
Should you end up with a phone with the 9200+ you’ll also be ready for WiFi 7, a standard that isn’t even out yet but can support up to 6.5Gbps data speeds. Throw in Bluetooth 5.3 and Bluetooth low energy (LE) and the chip should provide a solid foundation for the phones it ends up powering.
Smartphone chipset specs can often drag you fully into the weeds, but MediaTek matching Qualcomm blow-for-blow on the specs sheet is to be expected in 2023. The specs on show for the 9200+ mean it should rival the rumoured 8+ Gen 2, and potentially even the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
The Dimensity 9200 is no slouch, but when tested on the Vivo X90 Pro it didn’t perform quite as well as the 8 Gen 2. In real world use, those differences are barely noticeable though.
MediaTek chips are cropping up more frequently in phones from Vivo and Motorola, and increasingly for brands such as Xiaomi, Oppo, and OnePlus.
The Dimensity 9200+ could be an attractive choice for those Android manufacturers as they line up their upcoming flagship phones, especially as the chip supports sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G – making it ready for phones aimed at the US market too.
MediaTek is also competing with Qualcomm on cutting-edge tech that’s not even completely proven yet in phones. The Dimensity 9200+’s 690 AI processing unit claims it can handle AI-noise reduction and other tasks for smartphone photography, but it’s up to the Android makers themselves to implement such features on their phones.
The chipsets allow for such smarts, but MediaTek and Qualcomm don’t have the final say on how it works by the time it gets into people’s hands.
Phones with the 9200+ could be in those hands very soon. MediaTek said handsets using the chip will be announced this month.
Author: Henry Burrell, Contributor, Tech Advisor
Previously Tech Advisor’s Phones Editor, Henry covers and reviews every smartphone worth knowing about. He spends a lot of time moving between different handsets and shouting at WhatsApp to support multiple devices at once.