Dimensity 8000 and 8100: 5 nm Snapdragon 888 rivals officially unveiled by MediaTek

MediaTek has announced two new high-end smartphone SoCs to bring the fight to Qualcomm and Samsung. The Dimensity 8000 and Dimensity 8100 have been leaked extensively over the past few weeks, with the latter managing to outperform Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 in some benchmarks, primarily due to them being fabbed on TSMC's 5 nm process. Several OEMs such as Xiaomi, Oppo and OnePlus have Dimensity 8100 smartphones lined up.

For the most part, the MediaTek Dimensity 8000 and 8100 are nearly identical. Both use four ARM Cortex-A78 CPU cores in tandem with four Cortex-A55 cores and an ARM Mali G610-MC6 GPU. The Dimensity 8000 clocks the Cortex-A78 cores at 2.75 GHz, whereas the Dimensity 8100 bumps that up to 2.85 GHz. The GPU and NPU get a performance boost on the latter as well.

Additionally, the MediaTek Dimensity 8000's maximum screen resolution/framerate support is limited to FHD+165 Hz. The Dimensity 8100, on the other hand, handle WQHD+ screens clocked at 120 Hz. Everything else is pretty much identical across both chipsets, which use MediaTek's Imagiq 780 ISP that supports up to a single 200 MP camera sensor, HDR10+ videography at 4K 60 FPS, and a triple camera setup of 32 MP + 32 MP + 16 MP.

Connectivity options on the MediaTek Dimensity 8100 and Dimensity 8000 include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Bluetooth LE, and sub-6 GHz 5G. It lacks a mmWave radio, which isn't surprising. Quad-channel LPDDR5 memory is supported, along with UFS 3.1 storage. MediaTek says that smartphones running the Dimensity 8000 and Dimensity 8100 will hit shelves sometime in Q1, 2022.