LAS VEGAS—MediaTek today announced a set of 5G mobile-phone chipsets for lower-cost devices that will compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 765 line. But their success in the US depends on whether carriers will accept phones that don't have the fast but short-range millimeter-wave technology.
The Dimensity 800 is MediaTek's second 5G chipset, after its higher-tier Dimensity 1000. It features four Arm Cortex-A76 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores, all running at up to 2GHz. There's a custom AI block providing 2.4 TOPS (trillions or tera operations per second) of performance and a camera ISP supporting single 64MP sensors or dual 32+16MP setups. The chipset supports 1080p screens at up to 90Hz.
Let's compare this to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765, the Dimensity 800's primary competitor. The 765 has two A76 cores, one clocked to 2.3GHz and one to 2.2GHz, as well as six A55 cores at 1.8GHz. It supports 192MP snapshots, 22MP dual cameras, 5.5 TOPS of AI, and 1080p screens at up to 120Hz.
So MediaTek will probably outperform Qualcomm's solution on raw CPU measures, with its larger number of performance cores, but other performance aspects are up in the air—how phones based on the two chipsets will deal with image processing tasks that combine their ISPs and AI engines, for instance.
MediaTek's 5G Gamble
The Dimensity 800 has better mid-band 5G performance than the Snapdragon 765. It supports two 100MHz 5G carriers, as opposed to one on the 765, for double the speed.
MediaTek's 5G position in the US is weak in 2020, though, because for now, Qualcomm has a monopoly on millimeter-wave antenna modules. Those modules are the only way for phones to access the high-speed, short-range millimeter-wave networks that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have all set up. The 765 supports millimeter-wave.
MediaTek-powered 5G phones may appear on Sprint, though, or on a combined Sprint/T-Mobile carrier. Sprint doesn't need millimeter-wave for 5G, and T-Mobile hasn't shown much enthusiasm for foregrounding its millimeter-wave offerings. At Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon Tech Summit, Sprint exec Ryan Sullivan expressed a desire to get much less expensive 5G phones onto his network, and dropping millimeter-wave support is one way to do that. Last February, MediaTek CEO Joe Chen told me he was shooting for $450 5G phones.
"The Dimensity 800 series is designed for global sub-6GHz 5G networks that are being deployed with increasing coverage throughout Asia, North America and Europe during 2020," the company said in a press release.
That probably means we'll see these low-cost phones arriving mid-year.