A major CPU boost is on the cards

Mediatek’s Dimensity chipsets have traditionally done well in the mid-range and budget segments, although it hasn’t edged out Qualcomm as the supplier of choice in the flagship space. The company has previously stated its intention to step up in the high-end space, and a new leak suggests next year’s flagship silicon could be one to watch.

Frequent Weibo tipster Digital Chat Station leaked specs that appear to be the next flagship Dimensity chipset, dubbed the Dimensity 2000 in previous leaks. In terms of the actual specs, the new chipset is tipped to offer a 4nm TSMC design, and a tri-cluster octa-core CPU.

The CPU layout purportedly consists of one heavy-lifting Cortex-X2 core at 3Ghz, three Cortex-A710 cores for medium tasks, and four Cortex-A510 cores for power-sipping tasks. This would be the first time Mediatek has adopted the Cortex X CPU, as it skipped the Cortex-X1 for its current Dimensity 1200 chipset. So this should put it on roughly equal footing as the Snapdragon 888 successor and the Exynos 2100 in the CPU arena.

Related: All you need to know about Mediatek processors

Meanwhile, the Weibo leaker claims that the new processor will offer an Arm Mali-G710 MC10 GPU. This is Arm’s latest top-flight smartphone GPU, picking up where the Mali-G78 left off. Arm previously stated that the Mali-G710 offered a 20% performance and efficiency boost over the Mali-G78 as well as a 35% uplift in machine learning power.

This graphics silicon should be noticeably more powerful than the Dimensity 1200, which uses an older Mali-G77 MP9 GPU. But we’re guessing it will only be on equal footing with the Exynos 2100 at best (assuming identical specs), as the Samsung chip offered a Mali-G78 MP14 GPU.

There’s more to a smartphone processor than just the CPU and GPU though, so we’re definitely keen to see what Mediatek has up its sleeve in terms of camera capabilities, multimedia features, modem support, and machine learning. The company is expected to reveal the supposed Dimensity 2000 SoC in Q4 2021, so we should know more in a couple of months.