I recently had the pleasure of reviewing the Oppo Find N2 Flip phone, which features a MediaTek Dimensity 9000+ chip, and I have been eagerly waiting for MediaTek to release its latest Dimensity refresh, the 9200+. The Dimensity 9200 (without the “+”), which was announced late last year, is already in devices like the Vivo X90 phone. But since the Vivo X90 isn’t available in the US, it has been hard to experience what the Dimensity 9200 has to offer. The Dimensity 9200 is also available in the ASUS ROG 7 gaming phone, but, like Vivo has done with the X90, ASUS has mostly promoted its higher-end ROG 7 Ultimate device, which uses a Snapdragon processor.
The Dimensity 9200 has had some limited success so far, but it does seem like MediaTek and its partners are ready for a mid-cycle refresh, which is usually a consequence of improving performance due to optimizations across the board.
The Dimensity 9200+
MediaTek’s Dimensity 9200+ brings a speed boost to what was already MediaTek’s fastest mobile product and serves as a way for the company to prolong the life of the Dimensity 9200 design. The 9200+ effectively serves as MediaTek’s new flagship, and I expect that we will see the company and its partners continue to push to have the design included in flagship-tier devices. MediaTek says that the first devices powered by the Dimensity 9200+ are expected to be released in May 2023.
The Dimensity 9200+ sports what it calls a single ”ultra-core” Cortex-X3 CPU core operating at up to 3.35 gigahertz, along with three Arm Cortex-A715 cores running at 3.0 gigahertz supported by four Cortex-A150 efficiency cores running at 2.0 gigahertz. This is compared to the Dimensity 9200’s clock speeds of 3.05 gigahertz, 2.8 gigahertz and 1.8 gigahertz, respectively, for the same cores as the Dimensity 9200+. In addition to the CPU speed boosts, MediaTek also claims a 17% increase in GPU performance with its Arm Immortalis-G715 GPU
Analyst angle
These performance boosts that MediaTek is claiming should bring the Dimensity 9200+ much closer in benchmarks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which has helped Qualcomm maintain performance leadership in Android SoCs. The expectation is that Qualcomm will likely also release a speed-boosted variant of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 this year like it did last year with the 8+ Gen 1, which was very well received and provided a big boost for both Qualcomm’s OEM partners and consumer perceptions of the company.
Because the Dimensity 9200+ is expected to be available in commercial devices as soon as this month, it’s unlikely that there will be a Qualcomm answer to the Dimensity 9200+ for at least a few months. In this slowing, yet highly competitive mobile market between Qualcomm and MediaTek, we could see the Dimensity 9200+ reaching performance parity with Qualcomm for at least the next few months. Whether this will happen remains to be seen until we can physically test devices that include the Dimensity 9200+, but there’s at least a possibility of it based on the specs that MediaTek is quoting.
The dynamics within the mobile market are ever-changing, and I believe that the Dimensity line of SoCs is finally coming into its own thanks to ample performance from a renowned brand respected for delivering quality SoCs to its OEM partners. While the mobile market is still very much on the downswing due to a multitude of factors, there is still a lot of competition between MediaTek and Qualcomm; fighting for the absolute top-tier flagship SoCs will be important to both companies as they vie for brand power and performance leadership.
