MediaTek Dimensity 9000 engineering sample outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 while consuming less power ^↺

Although MediaTek officially unveiled its high-end Dimensity 9000 SoC some time ago, little is known about its real-world performance, especially against arch-rival Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The latter already powers several current-generation flagships, such as the Moto Edge X30 and the Xiaomi 12, so we have a decent idea about it. We now have a rough idea about how the Dimensity 9000 fares against the Qualcomm silicon.

YouTuber Geekerwan has received a MediaTek Dimensity 9000 prototype smartphone from the Taiwanese chipmaker. The "smartphone" is little more than an amalgamation of PCBs and a screen, and very notably, no cooling mechanism. It does, however, boot up Android and show us what the Dimensity 9000 is capable of in benchmarks and real-world tests. Starting with Geekbench, the SoC manages to net single and multi-core scores of 1,287 and 4,474. The former is a hair above the Snapdragon Gen 1's single-core prowess, but the latter is almost 17% more. The Dimensity 9000 surpasses the A14 Bionic in multi-core performance but fails to beat the A15.

Many enthusiasts (ourselves included) prophesied that the MediaTek Dimensity 9000 would greatly benefit from TSMC's 4nm node. That prediction turned out to be accurate, as confirmed by the chipset's power consumption. It drew only 9.8W of power across all cores at peak load and 3.5W on a single core, significantly lower than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's 11.2W (4.2W single-core) power draw.

Team Qualcomm takes back the performance crown on the GPU side, though. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1's Adreno 730 manages to outperform the Mediatek Dimensity 9000's ARM Mali G710-MC10. However, the difference in performance is minimal, and the MediaTek part draws significantly lesser power. The result is replicated in a real-world Genshin Impact test, where ARM's GPU falls flat against Qualcomm's silicon.

We must bear in mind that a Dimensity 9000 engineering sample managed to edge out the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The performance differential will likely be even wider with proper cooling mechanisms, optimisations, and drivers in place. A MediaTek executive said that it wanted to take the fight to Apple's mobile silicon, and the Dimensity 9000 might have what it takes to trade blows with last year's Apple chips.