"Although the MediaTek chip has been out for several months now, we still have only seen a handful of devices using it, while in recent months we’ve seen a ton of Snapdragon 765 devices being announced and released."
quite surprising really as that phone was released about like 9 months ago (december 2019) and no one else has been using the Dimensity 1000L
they should have been trying to push it out far more, but for them to say that well we are waiting for Q3 2020 before we go worldwide is surprising
it already has full EU/UK 4G and 5G support, 40 2.3ghz and n70 3.5Ghz
unsure if it will follow some of the newer 5G phones that can use like the "Oppo Find X2 Neo 5G,the snap 765G" as tah phone can also do {n1/3/5/7/28, witch is basically converting the 4G bands into 5g} at later date
It would be nice if I could get an affordable vivo iQOO Z1 that worked on AT&T here in the US. I'd definitely purchase one, simply out of curiosity if nothing else.
"These are quite terrible results for the Imagination GPU, and in hindsight, makes their claim of a 2.5x performance increase with the new A-Series GPU look a lot less impressive"
Not to mention the good old "Apple stole the PowerVR design and all they have done since then is just tweak it slightly"... You still see a fair bit of that around the interwebs.
They didn't steal it, they just have an architectural license. The first GPUs for years were exactly that, tweaked designs that eventually morphed apart.
Xiaomi has announced Redmi K30 ultra with Dimensity 1000+ just now and it will be definitely an interesting product to test. There are a lot of products with MTK Dimensity SoCs but most of them are only available in China.
Which years? From 2010 to 2014, Apple used stock PowerVR GPUs, and then paid license fees to Imagination from 2014-2017, stopped in 2017 and started again in January 2020 (https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/02/imagination...
I'm no expert by any means, but reviews of mobile SoCs focus only on processing power and efficiency, which lead to one major issue: says absolute nothing about mobile connection quality. I suspect Qualcomm stack (modem/modem firmware, RF Front End, antennas and whatever else there is) is vastly superior. This is not very often talked of (if any at all), but it had a significant impact onreal usage. Remember Apple not just buried the hatchet with, but also signed a multiyear deal with Qualcomm for chipsets (mainly modems, I presume).
I believe if you've read enough you'd notice that there's massive discrepancies of connection quality between QC powered models, so at least the front end and antennas should depend primarily on manufacturer implementation. OTOH Huawei diehards claim Huawei has superior connection quality, which I don't dismiss but instead attribute to Huawei's telecoms hardware discriminating against non-Huawei handsets, explaining how these claims only arise from regions where Huawei's telecoms branch comes close to a monopoly, like China, south Asia, the Middle East etc.
Nope, if you looked at GB5 and SPEC06, the raw performance is not bad at all, far better than 765G, but the actual performance is lagging behind Reno3 Pro 5G especially with responsiveness/burst load.
It's interesting to see the Dimensity 800/820 actually show up in more phones (couple of Honor and Huawei's, at least one Xiaomi/Redmi) than the 1000/1000L/1000+ so far. Almost makes you wonder if the original wafers they ordered for the 1000's had a pretty bad defect, didn't get caught until far too long after tape out and then they were stuck salvaging some low percentage of good dies for 1000L's and the 1000+ is a pretty deep silicon respin, hopefully with more wafer starts...
Hi Andrei,I think IMG A-Series 2.5x improvement claim still impressive because at 12nm(iso node process, area and power like Helio P90) compared to snapdragon 765g at 7nm. If I multiply 2.5 times to your all GPU benchmarks, IMG A-Series ahead all snapdragon 765g scores except Aztec ruin(I hope A-Series architecture have improvement on that benchmark compared to PowerVR GM9446).
Do you know how many peak system active power(minus screen power) of Reno 3 pro(Helio p95) Andrei?
The hardware is often excellent on these Chinese phones. No matter if Oppo, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc. But the software and its support is horrible. The customization of Android is horribly buggy and overdone, especially the power saving "features". They often offer whitelists for apps, but they actually dont work. Not even Gmail is working in the background, not to mention apps from 3rd parties. They even end background apps automatically after a few hours or days without you realizing. Imagine someone for example with diabetes using and 3rd party app for alarms... And then of course the support ends very quickly (around 2 years) and even simple security patches often break a lot. Sad, really. A real waste.
I had high hopes in BQ, a Spanish producer, because their support and small customizations of Android were absolutely awesome, not to say perfect. But they got bought by a Vietnamese corporation and stopped producing phones after that.
Do you actually have any sources for your claims? As far as I am aware, the software support for Xiaomi flagships, at least, are pretty good. The Android version may not be updated that much but the features trickle in via MIUI updates so it doesn't really matter
For instance, the Mi MIX 2 released in 2017 September is still slated to receive the latest MIUI. That's literally 3 years of software support, which is something only matched by Pixel and OnePlus (and Samsung, but only their newer devices)
I had several Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Oppo and others. Sure, sometimes after many months a few get a security patch. Like the Honor 9 from 2017 lately, that didnt get a security patch since July 2019, and then suddenly got the May 2020 security update and some added features. But thats really nothing to be proud of. You cant really take that for granted either. It pretty much happens randomly.
Of course he does not have any evident or source to back up his claims. He’s just like other Apple sheep thinking that every “security” update is actually security update.
Realme X was already discontinued since months ago.
Realme releases phones like someone with diarrhea, and only produce it for 6 months at most. Even here, where Realme ranks 4th of smartphone market share, Realme X is nowhere to found.
It would be nice to see more non-Qualcomm phone SoCs out there. In particular just because of the recent Qualcomm DSP vulnerabilities that may never get patched on poorly or not updated phones. Qualcomm has released fixes, but we know all too well how bad things are in a world of disposable handsets.
Other SoC options may somewhat help prevent these from getting too widespread. Then again, some form of better update deployment would help a lot more and I'm not sure that will ever happen because it probably needs to be done by Google and be baked into Android rather than the fragmented manner its left in now and that has all sorts of implications plus logistical considerations akin to and potentially worse than those that Microsoft faces with PC patches.
You REALLY think that a chinese mediatek chip is going to be more secure then a qualcomm chip? How many vulnerabilities on Mediatek chips have either not been disclosed or never found in the first place because they dont care about older chips?
Android security is also not the big scary monster man people make it out to be. Android is relatively locked down in terms of installing software compared to a PC. 99% of android problems are misbehaving facebook installations or people not understanding how to empty their storage correctly.
"Why dont we see more Mediatek"? Well two reasons.
1.) Mediatek phones do not support CDMA, so they are a no go in the USA.
2.) Mediatek has a well earned reputation for producing some unspeakably horiffic chipsets. 'unable to run correctly at stock speeds' level terrible. Most brands tend to avoid cheap garbage. Even if Mediatek has straightened out their designs, it will take years before companies trust them enough to use their chips in any halfway expensive phones.
Combination of Huawei Phones with Mediatek Chipsets is indeed a Synergetic relationship that could give Qualcomm the competition it needs by making Mediatek relevant again.
GNU GPL v2 violator, these phones do not get proper updates and use that Chinese OSes on top. OnePlus had a breach again in 2020 for loss of customer data. Cannot run a Custom ROM on these devices.
This MediaTek is trash since start and It has to stay like that unless they open up.
What's so dissapointing for the GM9446 GPU results? I can see from IMG's homepage a 2 cluster design clocked at 970MHz which performs roughly in the PowerVR Marlowe ballpark which was a 4 cluster S8 design clocked at 800MHz. If IMG's Alborix claims are close to reality, a 4 cluster design at the same frequency should be fairly close to A13 performance.
Slightly off topic question about the benchmarks. The Apple devices are well ahead in both CPU and GPU benchmarks, but my experience with 3 different current model iPads is a different story. Even my iPad Pro stutters playing minecraft, whereas my air and iPad are much slower. And battery life playing Minecraft is awful, only a few hours. Nothing like the promise that these are true PC replacements. So my question is why is there such a difference between the incredible benchmark performance and actual real world usage.
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DanNeely - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
On the last page this paragraph is present twice:"Although the MediaTek chip has been out for several months now, we still have only seen a handful of devices using it, while in recent months we’ve seen a ton of Snapdragon 765 devices being announced and released."
leexgx - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
quite surprising really as that phone was released about like 9 months ago (december 2019) and no one else has been using the Dimensity 1000Lthey should have been trying to push it out far more, but for them to say that well we are waiting for Q3 2020 before we go worldwide is surprising
it already has full EU/UK 4G and 5G support, 40 2.3ghz and n70 3.5Ghz
unsure if it will follow some of the newer 5G phones that can use like the "Oppo Find X2 Neo 5G,the snap 765G" as tah phone can also do {n1/3/5/7/28, witch is basically converting the 4G bands into 5g} at later date
leexgx - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
(n78 not n70)beginner99 - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Yeah having read this article I will certainly not buy one of these snapdragon765 phones and wait for such with 1000L.Mikad - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
The link in the sentence "grave limbo and run the risk of no longer seeing successors in the future" seems to be pointing into a local hard drive.Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
No idea how that happened- fixed.liteon163 - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
It would be nice if I could get an affordable vivo iQOO Z1 that worked on AT&T here in the US. I'd definitely purchase one, simply out of curiosity if nothing else.name99 - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
"These are quite terrible results for the Imagination GPU, and in hindsight, makes their claim of a 2.5x performance increase with the new A-Series GPU look a lot less impressive"Not to mention the good old "Apple stole the PowerVR design and all they have done since then is just tweak it slightly"... You still see a fair bit of that around the interwebs.
Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
They didn't steal it, they just have an architectural license. The first GPUs for years were exactly that, tweaked designs that eventually morphed apart.Gnyueh - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Xiaomi has announced Redmi K30 ultra with Dimensity 1000+ just now and it will be definitely an interesting product to test. There are a lot of products with MTK Dimensity SoCs but most of them are only available in China.dotjaz - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
For years they only had interim licensing and they didn't have a license before starting the process, I'd call that stealing.londedoganet - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
> For years they only had interim licensingWhich years? From 2010 to 2014, Apple used stock PowerVR GPUs, and then paid license fees to Imagination from 2014-2017, stopped in 2017 and started again in January 2020 (https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/02/imagination...
deanylev - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
HiSilicon is spelled as "HiSilcion" on the last page.LiviuTM - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
I'm no expert by any means, but reviews of mobile SoCs focus only on processing power and efficiency, which lead to one major issue: says absolute nothing about mobile connection quality. I suspect Qualcomm stack (modem/modem firmware, RF Front End, antennas and whatever else there is) is vastly superior.This is not very often talked of (if any at all), but it had a significant impact onreal usage.
Remember Apple not just buried the hatchet with, but also signed a multiyear deal with Qualcomm for chipsets (mainly modems, I presume).
s.yu - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
I believe if you've read enough you'd notice that there's massive discrepancies of connection quality between QC powered models, so at least the front end and antennas should depend primarily on manufacturer implementation.OTOH Huawei diehards claim Huawei has superior connection quality, which I don't dismiss but instead attribute to Huawei's telecoms hardware discriminating against non-Huawei handsets, explaining how these claims only arise from regions where Huawei's telecoms branch comes close to a monopoly, like China, south Asia, the Middle East etc.
shabby - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
Why is there performance so poor with 4 a77 cores?HyperText - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
Frequency...dotjaz - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
Nope, if you looked at GB5 and SPEC06, the raw performance is not bad at all, far better than 765G, but the actual performance is lagging behind Reno3 Pro 5G especially with responsiveness/burst load.[ECHO] - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
Fascinating stuff Andrei, thanks for the write up![ECHO] - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
It's interesting to see the Dimensity 800/820 actually show up in more phones (couple of Honor and Huawei's, at least one Xiaomi/Redmi) than the 1000/1000L/1000+ so far. Almost makes you wonder if the original wafers they ordered for the 1000's had a pretty bad defect, didn't get caught until far too long after tape out and then they were stuck salvaging some low percentage of good dies for 1000L's and the 1000+ is a pretty deep silicon respin, hopefully with more wafer starts...s.yu - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
Reno 3 ProSheep. Whoever buys that device for the Pro moniker thinking its gonna be better has got to be pro at being sheep.mfaisalkemal - Monday, August 10, 2020 - link
Hi Andrei,I think IMG A-Series 2.5x improvement claim still impressive because at 12nm(iso node process, area and power like Helio P90) compared to snapdragon 765g at 7nm.If I multiply 2.5 times to your all GPU benchmarks, IMG A-Series ahead all snapdragon 765g scores except Aztec ruin(I hope A-Series architecture have improvement on that benchmark compared to PowerVR GM9446).
Do you know how many peak system active power(minus screen power) of Reno 3 pro(Helio p95) Andrei?
Beaver M. - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
The hardware is often excellent on these Chinese phones. No matter if Oppo, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc.But the software and its support is horrible. The customization of Android is horribly buggy and overdone, especially the power saving "features". They often offer whitelists for apps, but they actually dont work. Not even Gmail is working in the background, not to mention apps from 3rd parties. They even end background apps automatically after a few hours or days without you realizing. Imagine someone for example with diabetes using and 3rd party app for alarms...
And then of course the support ends very quickly (around 2 years) and even simple security patches often break a lot.
Sad, really. A real waste.
I had high hopes in BQ, a Spanish producer, because their support and small customizations of Android were absolutely awesome, not to say perfect. But they got bought by a Vietnamese corporation and stopped producing phones after that.
Retycint - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Do you actually have any sources for your claims? As far as I am aware, the software support for Xiaomi flagships, at least, are pretty good. The Android version may not be updated that much but the features trickle in via MIUI updates so it doesn't really matterRetycint - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
For instance, the Mi MIX 2 released in 2017 September is still slated to receive the latest MIUI. That's literally 3 years of software support, which is something only matched by Pixel and OnePlus (and Samsung, but only their newer devices)Beaver M. - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
I had several Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, Oppo and others.Sure, sometimes after many months a few get a security patch. Like the Honor 9 from 2017 lately, that didnt get a security patch since July 2019, and then suddenly got the May 2020 security update and some added features. But thats really nothing to be proud of. You cant really take that for granted either. It pretty much happens randomly.
sonny73n - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Of course he does not have any evident or source to back up his claims. He’s just like other Apple sheep thinking that every “security” update is actually security update.Beaver M. - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
Oh, so someone who hasnt owned anything Apple since 2008 and most likely wont ever again, is an "Apple sheep."Makes sense, sonny. :thumbsup:
Ptosio - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
Which makes you wonder: what won't these manufacturers release more pure Android headsets? It shouldn't be so hard...flyingpants265 - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Boycott this phone, Realme X is the same thing for $142 USD. Artificially limited and sold in Asia only or something.Fritzkier - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link
Realme X was already discontinued since months ago.Realme releases phones like someone with diarrhea, and only produce it for 6 months at most. Even here, where Realme ranks 4th of smartphone market share, Realme X is nowhere to found.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
It would be nice to see more non-Qualcomm phone SoCs out there. In particular just because of the recent Qualcomm DSP vulnerabilities that may never get patched on poorly or not updated phones. Qualcomm has released fixes, but we know all too well how bad things are in a world of disposable handsets.https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252487274/Qual...
Other SoC options may somewhat help prevent these from getting too widespread. Then again, some form of better update deployment would help a lot more and I'm not sure that will ever happen because it probably needs to be done by Google and be baked into Android rather than the fragmented manner its left in now and that has all sorts of implications plus logistical considerations akin to and potentially worse than those that Microsoft faces with PC patches.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
You REALLY think that a chinese mediatek chip is going to be more secure then a qualcomm chip? How many vulnerabilities on Mediatek chips have either not been disclosed or never found in the first place because they dont care about older chips?Android security is also not the big scary monster man people make it out to be. Android is relatively locked down in terms of installing software compared to a PC. 99% of android problems are misbehaving facebook installations or people not understanding how to empty their storage correctly.
PeachNCream - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Sorry, I'm not getting into the anti China racism rhetoric with you. We see enough of that from Duck Trampoline's press briefings.Fritzkier - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link
He mention that Mediatek are Chinese. Apparently he don't know the difference between Taiwan and Mainland China.NitinYadav251096 - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
I agree with you. But it's time now to bring the MediaTek 5G chipsets in the Indian market and they can do quite well.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
"Why dont we see more Mediatek"? Well two reasons.1.) Mediatek phones do not support CDMA, so they are a no go in the USA.
2.) Mediatek has a well earned reputation for producing some unspeakably horiffic chipsets. 'unable to run correctly at stock speeds' level terrible. Most brands tend to avoid cheap garbage. Even if Mediatek has straightened out their designs, it will take years before companies trust them enough to use their chips in any halfway expensive phones.
Andrei Frumusanu - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
1) They support CDMA and have had for years.https://www.mediatek.com/news-events/press-release...
https://www.mediatek.com/news-events/press-release...
2) I haven't seen evidence of this. The only times they had issues is when everybody else had issues as well (20nm, so on).
patel21 - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Combination of Huawei Phones with Mediatek Chipsets is indeed a Synergetic relationship that could give Qualcomm the competition it needs by making Mediatek relevant again.Quantumz0d - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
GNU GPL v2 violator, these phones do not get proper updates and use that Chinese OSes on top. OnePlus had a breach again in 2020 for loss of customer data. Cannot run a Custom ROM on these devices.This MediaTek is trash since start and It has to stay like that unless they open up.
regsEx - Tuesday, August 11, 2020 - link
Back in the days MediaTek was pretty bad with drivers. What about support and optimizations now?Ailuros2020 - Wednesday, August 12, 2020 - link
What's so dissapointing for the GM9446 GPU results? I can see from IMG's homepage a 2 cluster design clocked at 970MHz which performs roughly in the PowerVR Marlowe ballpark which was a 4 cluster S8 design clocked at 800MHz. If IMG's Alborix claims are close to reality, a 4 cluster design at the same frequency should be fairly close to A13 performance.Speedfriend - Wednesday, August 26, 2020 - link
Slightly off topic question about the benchmarks. The Apple devices are well ahead in both CPU and GPU benchmarks, but my experience with 3 different current model iPads is a different story. Even my iPad Pro stutters playing minecraft, whereas my air and iPad are much slower. And battery life playing Minecraft is awful, only a few hours. Nothing like the promise that these are true PC replacements. So my question is why is there such a difference between the incredible benchmark performance and actual real world usage.destroy1234 - Friday, August 28, 2020 - link
Saw some users complained about Redmi K30 Ultra for having 6-8 hours screen on time, so that's why nobody using D1000 series?