Taiwanese chipset maker MediaTek has finally announced a flagship chipset that could go head-to-head with other flagships from Qualcomm and Samsung. The 5G Dimensity 9000 is the world’s first smartphone chipset to be built on a 4nm process with Arm’s new v9 architecture.

The Dimensity 9000 is MediaTek’s most powerful mobile chip to date and it combines Arm’s new single Cortex-X2 performance core clocked at 3.05GHz, three Cortex-A710 cores at 2.85GHz, and four Cortex-A510 efficiency cores at 1.8GHz. For graphics, it makes use of a new 10-core Arm Mali-G710, with MediaTek’s new APU (AI Processing Unit) which according to MediaTek provides four times the performance and power efficiency compared to the previous generation.

For connectivity, the chipset is the first to include Bluetooth 4.3, and it also supports Wi-Fi 6E 2×2. The chipset is Bluetooth Audio LE-ready with Dual-Link True Wireless Stereo Audio, and it supports a new Beidou III-B1C GNSS standard. The chipset has a 5G modem that supports 3GPP’s Release-16 standard but it still falls shorts of other flagship chipsets from competitors by only offering the sub-6GHz 5G flavour.

Theoretically, the Dimensity 9000’s ISP (Image Signal Processor) is capable of capturing 4K HDR video from three cameras all at the same time. MediaTek says by capturing three exposures simultaneously from three cameras, the ISP can process a total of 270 frames per second to output 18-bit 4K HDR video. The ISP also supports camera sensors of up to 320MP.

The first smartphones running the Dimensity 9000 is expected to be released in Q1 2022. With Qualcomm gearing up to announce the successor to its flagship Snapdragon 888 chipset on November 30th, it would be interesting to see how the Dimensity 9000 still measure up.