MediaTek has been doing excellent work rebooting its entire chipset business in the last couple of years, with its Dimensity line of SoCs coming to all kinds of smartphones. One in particular that has been interesting is the Dimensity 9000, which was released last year and, in the west, only really arrived with the Asus ROG Phone 6D Ultimate. Now, though, the company is following up with the Dimensity 9200... and it says that it'll come to the west a lot sooner than last time around.

MediaTek prides itself on this being the first chipset to be built and made available with Arm's new Cortex-X3 and Cortex-A715 cores, and it's also built on the second generation of TSMC's 4nm process.

MediaTek Dimensity 9200: Specifications

MediaTek Dimensity 9200: Design

The MediaTek Dimensity 9200 features an octa-core CPU setup, consisting of 1x Arm Cortex-X3 core clocked at 3.05GHz, 3x Arm Cortex-A715 cores clocked at 2.85GHz, and 4x efficiency Arm Cortex-A510 cores. The CPU and GPU designs are based on Armv9 architecture, a direct successor to Armv8 that promises improved security and performance. The Dimensity 9200 is also the first chipset to feature the Cortex-X3, the most powerful CPU core from Arm. It's unclear if this is a 64-bit-only chipset, as while the A510 doesn't support AArch64, the A510 Refresh (released alongside the A715 and the X3) does. Update: MediaTek confirmed to us that the Dimensity 9200 packs Cortex A510 Refresh cores, confirming that this chipset supports 32-bit applications.

As for the GPU, that's handled by the all-new Immortalis G715 GPU from Arm. It boasts Vulkan 1.3 support with 11 cores and hardware-based raytracing support. In other words, it's a pretty powerful GPU that one would hope can compete with the best from Qualcomm, though that remains to be seen. It can push up to 240Hz at FHD, or a 5K display at 60Hz, though that's probably an unlikely scenario for an Android smartphone.

In terms of improvements and other aspects, MediaTek also introduced a new APU, the APU 690, which should see some nice improvements in AI. For example, MediaTek says that the Dimensity 9200's APU has 35% higher performance (according to ETHZ5.0), an upgraded Deep Learning Accelerator (DLA) with a mixed precision mode, and upgraded shared memory efficiency.

Finally, in the ISP realm, the company's Imagiq 890 can work with the APU through the Video Stream Engine in order to allow device makers to add unique AI-video enhancements to the video stream as it is processed by the ISP. There's also an improvement in energy consumption when filming in 8K, and it has the company's fastest AI-NR photo capture yet.

As well, MediaTek's Dimensity 9200 is Wi-Fi 7 ready (the first SoC to be), supports RGBW sensors natively, will support UFS 4.0 and Multi Circular Queue (MCQ), and will have better heat dissipation. The second generation of TSMC's 4nm fabrication process should also net some performance and efficiency gains, with the company saying that there is an up-to 25% decrease in power usage from last year's Dimensity 9000. That's a significant improvement if it materializes.

MediaTek Dimensity 9200: Availability

The MediaTek Dimensity 9200 will be available in markets by the end of 2022, though the company hasn't listed any particular smartphone vendors that will be implementing it in their smartphones yet. We can expect it to have a wider release than last year's flagship, but how wide is up in the air currently.