There are many smartphone brands we commonly see: Huawei, Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, so many that you might not be able to count them all with your fingers and toes.However, when it comes to the number of mainstream brands for mobile system chips, I can count them on one hand — Qualcomm, Huawei HiSilicon, Samsung Exynos, MediaTek, and Apple’s A-series processors.
In the past, we had the impression that Qualcomm’s chips were the best, with strong performance and good signal; MediaTek was the worst, lacking in everything; while Huawei was gradually catching up, even surpassing Qualcomm in some aspects.However, this week, MediaTek, a company from Taiwan, which we often think of as underperforming, suddenly released a brand new chip called “Dimensity 1000”.
Did it really outperform all other chips on the market?!
The newly released “Dimensity 1000” scored 40,000 points higher than the Snapdragon 855+, and 50,000 points higher than the Kirin 990 5G version on AnTuTu, and even the AI score was 4,000 points higher than the Kirin 990 5G.Most importantly, the 5G upload and download speeds of the Dimensity 1000 are directly double those of the current Qualcomm and Huawei chips, reaching 4.7 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps.This is like the underperforming student in class suddenly making big news, and tech enthusiasts following the smartphone industry are in an uproar — “MediaTek’s return to the high-end market is imminent”.
Wait a minute, I need to interject here; while MediaTek’s performance this time can be considered a significant leap, saying it has returned to the high-end market might not be entirely accurate.Because theoretically, MediaTek has never really established itself in the high-end mobile system chip market..
In the early days, before we had iPhones and Androids, the streets were filled with foreign brands like Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola.One important reason foreign brands were able to form a monopoly was due to a thing called “communication baseband“; if the baseband built into the phone is good, the received signal is strong, and phone calls are stable.
Not to be embarrassed, there were a few domestic manufacturers that could produce other components of the phone at that time, but they just couldn’t produce this communication baseband, and the foreign chips were not sold separately.(Otherwise, how could it be called a monopoly?)The result was that MediaTek somehow managed to solve the communication baseband issue, which at that time was akin to breaking through foreign technological blockades.
Moreover, MediaTek began innovating based on our domestic conditions, introducing classic features like dual SIM dual standby and triple SIM triple standby, which foreign brands at the time mostly only offered single SIM single standby.
The key point is that MediaTek did not take advantage of being the “only domestic mobile communication baseband” to raise prices; the chips were sold particularly cheaply!This led to the rise of domestic smartphone manufacturers like Waveguide, Tianyu, Gionee, and TCL, and the mysterious Huaqiangbei in Shenzhen with countless “magic machines”.
It was with these phones, which we now see as “knockoff phones”, that MediaTek captured nearly half of the domestic chip shipment volume at that time, and its market value soared.
However, as smartphones began to develop, MediaTek started to struggle.Because in addition to traditional CPU, GPU, and communication baseband, smartphones now have many more functions than before.
Functions like WiFi, Bluetooth, camera control, fingerprint encryption, and newer AI computing also need to be integrated into a small processing chip.For example, the Kirin 990 processor released by Huawei recently, is a chip the size of a fingernail, which contains 10.3 billion transistors.
So now, what we use in smartphones is not just a processor, but rather a small system.And with such a high level of integration, MediaTek’s previous technology level in making feature phone chips indeed couldn’t keep up.
A few years ago, I bought an Android tablet that used a MediaTek chip; its performance was comparable to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625, but the WiFi would frequently disconnect, and the battery drained quickly.There are many low-end tablets using MediaTek chips on Taobao
In fact, MediaTek has not shied away from challenging the high-end market; back in the day, MediaTek had ambitious plans and launched a series of mobile chips called “Helio”.The flagship model Helio X10 debuted on HTC’s M9+ phone, which was priced over 4,000 yuan.
Unfortunately, reality was harsh — the Helio X10 only matched the CPU performance of the contemporaneous Qualcomm flagship chip, while other aspects like GPU, WiFi, and heat control were inferior.
So not long after, this chip ended up in a 699 yuan Redmi phone.Thus, MediaTek was continuously overshadowed by Qualcomm, leading to the perception that “MediaTek chips are inferior” becoming a meme that persists to this day.
Given that MediaTek is so underwhelming, it should have faded away long ago, but in fact, MediaTek has managed to survive, largely thanks to Meizu.
Meizu’s CEO Huang Zhang publicly criticized Qualcomm for unreasonable patent fees, leading to a deterioration in the relationship between Qualcomm and Meizu, which for a long time prevented Meizu from purchasing Qualcomm’s processor chips.As a result, during the four years from 2014 to 2018, most of Meizu’s flagship phones used MediaTek chips.Due to the low performance, high heat, and poor battery life of MediaTek chips, Meizu also lost a significant portion of the flagship phone market.
So how did MediaTek suddenly turn things around this time?Firstly, MediaTek has taken the lead over Huawei and Qualcomm by being the first to use the latest ARM CPU and GPU architectures (A77 and G77 architectures).The performance of a core based on the A77 architecture is 20% higher than that of a core based on the A76 architecture.
If MediaTek were to stop here and wait until early next year when Qualcomm and Huawei also adopt A77+G77, MediaTek’s claim of “world’s best performance” might have to be relinquished.Secondly, the “overall environment has matured”; after all, smartphone CPUs and GPUs have developed to a point where performance does not double with each generation as it used to.Huawei, which started later than MediaTek, had last year’s Kirin 980 already comparable to Snapdragon 845.
So if MediaTek’s CPU and GPU performance continues to lag, it would be hard to justify.However, when we will actually see this chip in use is still uncertain.Do you remember that at the end of May this year, MediaTek announced together with Huawei that they would release a 5G flagship processor?As a result, Huawei began mass production in September, and the Mate 30 5G version has already reached consumers. MediaTek has just announced the start of mass production, and the smartphones using this chip won’t be available until next year.However, the manufacturer’s promotional strategy is to create a time difference, “the first batch is made today, and tomorrow it arrives at my house”, which is understandable. Moreover, MediaTek has indeed entered the first tier of smartphone processors.Even based on known information, the “Dimensity 1000” is the strongest mobile processor on the planet; however, we can only wait for the release of smartphones equipped with it next year to see how it performs.Image and data sources:
ANANDTECH, Huawei Announces Kirin 990 and 990 5G SoCANANDTECH, MediaTek Announces Dimensity 1000 SoCANANDTECH, Samsung Announces Exynos 980smartprix, ARM Cortex-A77 vs Cortex-A76 Cores: What has changed?appleinsider, TSMC will use updated ‘N7 Pro’ 7-nanometer process for ‘A13’ chip manufacturingReferline, MediaTek G90T Performance Test: Is it Enough to Challenge Kirin 810 and Snapdragon 730G?ifanr, MediaTek’s “Rise and Fall”: It Was Once the Light of Domestic Phones, but Now Only Chosen by Two ManufacturersSome images are from the internetSome statistics are from MediaTek’s press conference, AnTuTu, and GFXBench
“If MediaTek had been this impressive back then, Meizu would have… ”