MediaTek announces Dimensity 820-soc with 5g modem for mid-range smartphones

MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 820, a soc for midrange smartphones that are positioned a bit higher. The chipset should follow the Dimensity 800 and contains a CPU with higher clock speeds and the same built-in 5G modem.

Like the Dimensity 800, the 820 includes an integrated 5G modem with support for frequencies lower than 6GHz, although the new chipset also does not support mmWave frequencies. The latter also applies to the Dimensity 1000, which is intended for high-end smartphones. Like the 800, the 820 has two carrier aggregation so that a smooth transition between 5G networks is possible. There is also support for dynamic spectrum sharing, so that 4g and 5g can be used dynamically and on the same frequency bands.

The Dimensity 820 has four Cortex-A76 cores at 2.6GHz, supplemented by four frugal Coretex-A55 cores at 2GHz. That corresponds to the CPU of the 800, although it has to make do with four Cortex-A76 cores at 2.0GHz. The GPU is an ARM Mali G57; it is also in the Dimensity 800, but the 820 has a variant with five cores instead of four. The 820 series supports full HD+ resolutions at up to 120Hz, where the 800 doesn’t go beyond 90Hz.

There is also support for camera sensors with a resolution of up to 80 megapixels, where the 800 only supports sensors with a 64-megapixel resolution. Smartphone manufacturers can integrate a total of four cameras. Identical to the Dimensity 800 is the existing AI processing unit with a computing power of 2.4 tera-operations per second to relieve the processor for certain tasks, such as object recognition.

Like the 1000 and 800 socs, the Dimensity 820 is made at 7nm. It is still unclear when the first phones with the new chipset will appear. To date, the Dimensity 800 announced at the beginning of this year has not yet been integrated into a consumer smartphone.