MediaTek Announces Dimensity 1100 & 1200 SoCs: A78 on 6nm

Today MediaTek announced two new top-end SoCs in the form of the new Dimensity 1100 and Dimensity 1200. The two new designs are a follow-up to last year’s Dimensity 1000 SoC which marked the company’s return to the high-end in 2020, with a relatively solid SoC design.

The two new chipsets upgrade the Dimensity 1000 in terms of CPU configuration and camera ability, as well as coming in a new 6nm process node. The new chips however don’t upgrade every aspect of their designs, as things such as the GPU configuration and the modem capabilities seem to be identical to that of the Dimensity 1000.

Starting off where we see the biggest changes, the two new SoCs differ the most from its predecessor on the CPU side of things. The Dimensity 1100 is quite straightforward in that it replaces the Cortex-A77 cores with newer Cortex-A78 cores. The configuration still remains at 4 cores running at 2.6GHz (as the higher-bin Dimensity 1000+), with four Cortex-A55 cores at 2.0GHz as the little cores.

The Dimensity 1200 changes the configuration to a 1+3+4 setup, with one performance Cortex-A78 core clocking up to 3.0GHz, and MediaTek stating that it sports double the L2 cache compared to the other cores. This would mean it has a 512KB configuration while the other 3 cores feature 256KB L2’s. The 1+3 big cores setup is also accompanied by 4x Cortex-A55 cores at 2GHz.

The GPU side of things is a bit weird, as oddly enough it features the exact same setup as the Dimensity 1000, and we again see a Mali-G77MP9 configuration on both new chipsets. That’s very odd given the fact that other competitor chipsets are deploying new Mali-G78 designs.

DRAM capability remains at LPDDR4X at 2133MHz – the lack of LPDDR5 isn’t too surprising here given the performance gains aren’t too great and these chipset designs are to be used in more cost-effective devices.

NPU and AI capabilities aren’t exactly clear on the Dimensity 1100 and it seems to be identical to that of the Dimensity 1000 – the Dimensity 1200 advertises a performance boost of 12.5% which could just be a slight clock frequency upgrade compared to its predecessor.

On the camera capabilities, the new chips don’t change their multi-camera configurations, still being at 32+16MP, however both increase the single-camera advertised capability up to respectively 108MP and 200MP for the Dimensity 1100 and Dimensity 1200.

On the 5G modem side, we’re seeing no apparent changes in the specifications supported by the new design, it still being a sub-6GHz only implementation.

The new chip is manufactured on a new 6nm process node at TSMC – a design-rule compatible shrink compared to the 7nm node that was used in the Dimensity 1000.

Both Dimensity 1100 are Dimensity 1200 are rather odd SoC designs in that they are rather small upgrades compared to their predecessor – in fact looking at them one would think they are just minor refreshes on the ground-up redesign of their predecessor. It’s also very odd to see the very small feature disparity between the 1100 and 1200, even though these should be different chip designs and tape-outs given their CPU differences. The fact that MediaTek hasn’t upgraded the NPU/APU or GPUs in any substantial fashion also point out these would be rather small design upgrades to the previous generation. That’s not really a negative in itself, but it begs the question what MediaTek’s market plan for the new SoCs are.

MediaTek quotes vendors such as Xiaomi, Vivo, OPPO and realme as expressing support for the new SoCs, with devices using both SoCs being expected to be available at the end of Q1 and beginning of Q2 this year.

Related Reading:

• MediaTek Announces Dimensity 1000+ SoC
• MediaTek Announces Dimensity 1000 SoC: Back To The High-End With 5G
• OPPO's Reno3 5G vs Reno3 Pro vs Reno3 Pro 5G: Why Don't We See More MediaTek Dimensity 1000 Phones?
• Samsung Announces Exynos 1080 - 5nm Premium-Range SoC with A78 Cores
• Arm's New Cortex-A78 and Cortex-X1 Microarchitectures: An Efficiency and Performance Divergence