In the mobile chip industry, there is a hand full of companies in competition. We have the likes of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, MediaTek’s Dimensity, Samsung’s Exynos, and Huawei’s Kirin. However, with all the problems between the U.S. and Huawei, Kirin chips are now “out of print”. This means that Snapdragon, Dimensity, and Exynos are now the major players in the industry. Since Exynos chips are basically for Samsung’s phones in many cases, the battle is between Snapdragon and Dimensity.
The recognition of MediaTek’s 5G (Dimensity) chips by Chinese manufacturers skyrocketed the company to the top spot. In the second quarter of 2021, the company’s revenue almost doubled. However, MediaTek has always been in Qualcomm’s shadows in the flagship market. Nevertheless, the company will take the flagship market by storm this year. It will release its 4nm Dimensity 2000 SoC. Smartphones with this chip will cost above 5,000 yuan ($774).
In the 3G and 4G era, MediaTek’s chips were often used in the low-end market. Most of the smartphones that cost above 3,000 yuan ($465) mostly use Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. Now, in the 5G era, with the current Dimensity 1200 series, the price tag of MediaTek 5G chip-based smartphones is also 2000 yuan ($310) – 3000 yuan ($465).
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MediaTekās weapon to penetrate the flagship market is the Dimensity 2000 series which it will release at the end of the year. However, the Dimensity 2000 SoC will not be alone in the market. Qualcomm will also unveil the Snapdragon 898 SoC which also uses a 4nm process but from TSMC. The CPU super core is also Cortex-X2 while the GPU is upgraded to A79.Ā The price of mobile phones with Dimensity 2000 chips will not be cheap. The expectation is that smartphones with this processor will be $600 and $700.
Snapdragon 898 specifications
According to reports, the Snapdragon 898 would use a 1+3+2+2 quad-cluster architecture. In it, the Kryo 780 super-large core is based on Cortex-X2, the Kryo 780 large core is based on Cortex-710, and the Kryo 780 energy-efficient large core is based on Cortex-510 (High frequency) / the Kryo 780 energy efficiency small core is based on Cortex-A510 (low frequency). The Cortex-X2/A710/A510 is ARM’s latest public version design based on a 64-bit v9 instruction set, replacing X1/A78/A55 respectively.
Snapdragon 898 Expected Features
- Kryo 780 CPU core based on ARM Cortex v9 technology
- Adreno 730 GPU core
- Spectra 680 ISP image processor
- Up to 1GHz millimeter-wave downlink and 400MHz Sub-6 D rate
- Support Qualcomm Aqstic WCD9380/WCD9385 audio codec
- Qualcomm Security Processing Unit (SPU260)
- Support Qualcomm FastConnect 6900 subsystem
- Support four-channel package LPDDR5 RAM
- Adreno 665 Video Processing Unit (VPU)
- Adreno 1195 Display Processing Unit (DPU)
