MediaTek today at the Virtual MediaTek summit announced one of it’s newest chips in its Dimensity line, and instead of going bigger like I expected, with a Dimensity 1100 or something, they’ve kept going down, now to the Dimensity 700.
For a quick catch up, the Dimensity line of Chips from MediaTek is their 5G only line-up, these cost a little bit more than their other chips, but these are their 5G chips that even down this low, don’t suck. The high-level breakdown of the Dimensity 700 is 2x Cortex A76, 6x Cortex A55, TSMC 7nm. 5G is Sub6 only, but MediaTek doesn’t really have a presence in the US and the US is the only country that is seriously trying to make mmWave 5G happen, so this being Sub6 isn’t really that big of a deal.
Some of the cool 5G stuff this has? How about 2 channel carrier aggregation (merging two lines of 5G to give you better speeds) or how about Dual SIM Dual Standby, meaning that you can have a Dual SIM phone, where both SIMs can access 5G, and both can be active at the same time, so you can receive calls and texts or data on both SIMs at the same time. The Dimenisty 700 also has what MediaTek is calling VoNR, like VoIP (Voice over IP) and VoLTE (Voice over LTE) VoNR (Voice over Next Radio) is a new protocol that allows you to make higher fidelity voice calls over Sub6 5G. Lastly is 5G UltraSave, this is a proprietary set of tricks MediaTek is implementing to help battery life not really change from LTE, which is very nice to have.
There are other things, like up to 90Hz screens for 1080p+, up to 64MP main camera systems as well as dedicated DSP hardware for all of the major (non-Siri obviously) voice assistants with their hot words. No devices where announces that use these chips, but with the onslaught of devices racing to the bottom with 5G, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sub-£200 5G phone using the MediaTek Dimensity 700 any time soon,