MediaTek is unveiling its next generation of mid-range smartphone chips for 2022. The latest one is called Dimenisty 1080 and it’s here to replace its predecessor, the Dimensity 920. To be clear, the Dimensity 920 goes up against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700 series in terms of performance.
The biggest improvements that come with Dimensity 1080 are its camera capabilities. It can now handle up to 200MP camera sensors, up from the previous 108MP limit. This was made possible due to the Imagiq ISP, which is also capable of hardware-accelerated HDR videos at 4K resolution, but that was present in the previous model as well.
The main advantage here is that this will allow budget smartphones to feature Samsung’s new 200MP camera sensor, which is only available on high-end phones for now. Motorola Edge 30 Ultra/X30 Pro was the first to feature it, but it was soon adopted by the Xiaomi 12T Pro as well, which launched only a month after the former.
Other upgrades to Dimensity 1080 include a small CPU clock speed update to the performance cores. The two Cortex A78 performance cores are now clocked at 2.6GHz (up from 2.5GHz). The SoC is still built on a 6 nm process and the Mali G68 GPU is no different either. This means that benchmark scores will not be significantly different from the previous generation.
AI capabilities remain unchanged as well since it is the same AI Processing Unit (APU). The chip still supports sub-6GHz 5G networks, Wi-Fi 6, and Bluetooth 5.2. There are no new gaming features either. It has the same HyperEngine 3.0 as the 920.
MediaTek has promised that the first smartphones featuring Dimensity 1080 will start shipping by the end of this year. However, we might have to wait awhile for 200MP cameras on budget phones since it is only available on a very limited number of devices.
