MediaTek has today launched another chipset, which feels like a weekly occurrence now.
Most recently the company launched the Helio G85 which turned out to be the exact same as the Mediatek G80 but with a 50Mhz difference on the GPU.
There is a suspiciously low uptake of these new chipsets, and my best guess is that MediaTek is creating a new chipset specific to the company that uses it, giving them both a marketing boost with the ability to announce a brand new chipset.
Realme gets a Helio G80 so Xiaomi get a Helio G85
Realme has the Realme 6i and rather than reuse that chipset Xiaomi one-upped then with he Helio G85 in the Redmi Note 9.
There have been no Mediatek Dimensity 1000 phones, but there was that one 1000L phone
To date, there has not actually been a single company to use the flagship MediaTek Dimensity 1000 that was announced last year.
Oppo has the still officially unannounced MediaTek Launches Dimensity 1000L in the Oppo Reno3 5G (Chinese version). This leads me to suspect that the 1000L is, in fact, the Dimensity 1000.
Just one Dimensity 800 Phone
Oppo is also the only company to use the mid-range focussed Dimensity 800 inside the Oppo A92s which was recently announced. This chipset swaps out the A77 cores of from the 1000 and uses A76 cores. Then has a Mali-G57MP4 GPU vs Mali-G77 with 9-cores.
Mediatek Dimensity 1000 Plus sounds exactly the same as the Dimensity 1000
Today the company took the wraps off a new flagship chipset, the Dimensity 1000 Plus, because why wouldn’t you launch a new flagship chipset when no one has used the original flagship chipset.
The launch was done in Chinese, and therefore all the marketing material is in Chinese. So I am probably missing out on some key information.
But so far there is no clear indication of anything different in the CPU or GPU specification.
Mediatek Dimensity 1000 Plus Specification?
Like the vanilla version, the Dimensity 1000+ is a 7nm chip with four Cortex-A77 cores and four A55 cores and features a Mali—G77 MP9 GPU. The memory controller supports LPDDR4X in quad-channel mode.
Currently, the marketing material appears to be promoting the fact that the 1000+ chip supports 144Hz screens with a maximum resolution of 1080p+ (with aspect ratios of up to 21:9). The MiraEngine is tasked with enhancing SDR video and converting it to HDR10+.
They also claim that it features 5G UltraSave to reduce power usage of the modem. It has a low and a high bandwidth modes, and it dynamically switches between them, depending on what apps need. This allows it to cut power use by up to 32%.
Is the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 Plus just another marketing trick for a new iQOO phone?
However, if we look at the official Mediatek page for the 1000-series, these new technologies were already referenced fort the Dimensity 1000.
The announcement also states that iQOO already announced that it’s building a phone with the MediaTek Dimensity 1000+, but it does suggest that the phone will use a 144Hz screen
This is looking very much like the Helio G85 launch, where on the surface the chipsets are identical. I suspect in a few days it will become apparent that the new chipset has fractionally different clock speeds, likely on the GPU giving it a marginal boost in performance.
Overall
I am a bit gutted about MediaTeks recent form. The Helio G90T was superb, then the Dimensity 1000 looked to shake up the flagship market completely. The Dimensity 800 also looks promising as an upper mid-range chipset. Since then it has just been downhill for the company rereleasing old chipsets as new, and making extremely small changes to chipsets and rebadging it as something new. They were also recently called out for inflating the results of benchmarks which they then claimed was perfectly acceptable.
Hopefully, we will see some Dimensity 1000 based phones this year, and I hope they perform as well as promised so MediaTek can redeem themselves a little.
