CES 2020: MediaTek Announces New Dimensity 800 Mid-Range 5G SoC

Today MediaTek has announced a new entry into its new “Dimensity” 5G SoC product lineup. The new chip is called the Dimensity 800 and represents a mid-range solution for lower cost devices compared to the larger Dimensity 1000 flagship SoC. The chip’s main feature is the fact that it supports 5G connectivity in the sub-6 spectrum, making this amongst the first 5G designs at this price range.

The SoC is powered by an octa-core CPU setup, including 4x Cortex A76 cores at 2GHz alongside 4x Cortex A55 cores at also 2GHz. It’s interesting to see this segmentation in the IP – the A77 cores aren’t that much larger than the A76 cores, but it’s possible MediaTek has been able to optimise the A76 for higher density implementations, hence also the quite low frequency even though the new chip comes manufactured on TSMC’s 7nm N7 process node.

On the GPU side, we’re seeing a Mali-G57MP4 at an undisclosed frequency. The G57 is a derivative of the Valhall GPU family and covers the lower end spectrum of possible configurations.  Oddly enough, the Mali-G57 is the same microarchitecture as the G77, with the only differences in the IP being that the naming below and above 5 GPU cores.

The chip features a cut-down DRAM interface with only 2-ch (2x16b) LPDDR4X support at up to 2133MHz, so half the bandwidth of the Dimensity 1000.

The chip still comes with MTK’s newest 3^rd generation in-house APU/NPU for AI acceleration, but doesn’t disclose the breakdown in the same way they did with the D1000. They do state there’s up to 2.4TOPs of inferencing throughput which is actually still a very respectable figure for a SoC at this range.

The Dimensity 800 comes with 5G Sub-6 integrated modem; MediaTek discloses 2CC CA on the downlink. MTK at this time didn’t disclose more information on the throughput and how it compares to the D1000, but they do state DSS (Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) as a feature of the D800 which is an important characteristic for the chip’s modem.

We’ll be seeing Dimensity 800 based products being announced and come to market throughout 2020.

Related Reading:

• MediaTek Announces Dimensity 1000 SoC: Back To The High-End With 5G
• Intel and MediaTek Announce Partnership To Bring 5G Modems to PCs