High-end phones with MediaTek Dimensity 1200 chipsets will become more visibly different from each other thanks to MediaTek's new Dimensity 5G Open Resource Architecture, which the chipset company announced at the virtual Mobile World Congress today.
Phones with similar chipsets generally have similar raw performance. But one thing you may not think about is that phone makers are rarely addressing the chip itself. Rather, they go through firmware offered by the chipset provider, and sometimes they don't fine-tune that very much.
In my experience, this has been more of an issue with MediaTek than with Qualcomm. Because MediaTek chipsets are more often used by lower-cost manufacturers with smaller development teams, those companies are more likely to just take MediaTek's default firmware, while high-end Qualcomm licensees insist upon using their own camera algorithms and such.
MediaTek recently became the number-one global chipset provider by volume, but that's on the back of a huge number of low-end phones. At the high end, its Dimensity series has had a tough job battling Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung for phone makers' hearts, and this new initiative tries to show that it has higher-end phone makers' needs at heart.
MediaTek's open resource architecture will give brands the ability to better tune the Dimensity 1200 chipset for different performance. That's the company's highest-end chipset, and this strategy looks to me like a pitch for Qualcomm's higher-end Chinese clients—the OnePluses of the world, who may be looking to save a buck but not at the cost of differentiation.
The chipset maker calls out five ways phone companies will be able to customize: multimedia, multiprocessing, AI, cameras, and connectivity. With multimedia, they can lay down their own display and rendering algorithms, something OnePlus has been especially proud of the past few years.
The multiprocessing customization lets OEMs assign custom workloads to different parts of the chip, for example creating special gaming modes. Camera customization gives them raw access to data coming from the image signal processor. Connectivity means laying in their own Bluetooth feature profiles.
MediaTek didn't give any details of who's picking this new system up except to say in a press release if would be "the world's largest smartphone brands." So far, the Dimensity 1200 has only been seen in phones outside the US, including devices by Oppo, Realme, and Blackview.
It won't be long before we see what effect this really has, as MediaTek says the first phones based on the new strategy will appear in July.