Benchmarks suggest Dimensity 9000 is no pushover for Qualcomm

Mediatek and Qualcomm have both revealed their flagship processors for 2022, and it looks like the two chipsets are similarly capable on paper. Qualcomm revealed Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 benchmarks via journalists at the chipset’s launch, and Mediatek has now released a video showing off the Dimensity 9000’s benchmark performance.

The video, posted to Mediatek’s Weibo account, shows a Dimensity 9000 phone’s performance in Antutu, Geekbench 5.1, GFXBench Manhattan 3.0, and more. Check it out below.

We’d recommend you take these results with a major pinch of salt though. For one, it’s a Mediatek video with testing presumably done by the company rather than via a third party, and tests that the company chose. It’s also unclear whether the company ran the tests multiple times, which would help with accuracy and potentially reveal any throttling issues. It’s also not known whether the test device was running in a performance mode that compromises battery life for the sake of horsepower.

In any event, the tests show an Antutu v9 score of 1,017,488 points compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1’s 1,031,302 points reported by Hot Hardware (albeit for Antutu v8).

The Mediatek video shows the Dimensity 9000’s Geekbench scores too, using Geekbench 5.1. The chipset delivers a single-core score of 1,273 and a multi-core score of 4,324 compared to the Snapdragon chip’s reported scores of 1,233 and 3,740 respectively (albeit in Geekbench 5).

Mediatek’s chipset also delivered 238 fps in the GFXBench Manhattan 3.0 off-screen test, compared to the Snapdragon SoC’s reported 267 fps score.

What does this mean?

Mediatek’s video suggests that the two SoCs are evenly matched for single-core CPU workloads but that the Dimensity 9000 has a significant edge in multi-core scores. We’re guessing that the Mediatek chip’s higher clocked Cortex-A710 medium cores and Qualcomm’s use of merged core architecture for the Cortex-A510 little cores helped the Taiwanese company out here.

The clip suggests that Qualcomm has an ever-so-slim margin in a mixed workload like Antutu though, but it’s slim enough here that we could see the pendulum swing on a phone-by-phone basis. Qualcomm’s big win seems to come in the GPU department, according to GFXBench. But the Dimensity 9000’s results in this particular test would still be better than the iPhone 13 Pro and Snapdragon 888 phones.

Again, you should take the Mediatek video with a pinch of salt for the aforementioned reasons, and you should also take the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 benchmarks with some skepticism given that the reference device isn’t actually a commercial phone. The true test will come when real-world phones are available for testing. But it does suggest that Qualcomm and Mediatek are closer than they’ve been in several years.