Dimensity 9200 Continues Premium Push

MediaTek’s new top-of-the-line smartphone processor upgrades to the latest cores and protocols, offering ray tracing and other new capabilities for premium-phone buyers.

Linley Gwennap

After gaining a foothold in premium smartphones, MediaTek continues to push for more wins with its Dimensity 9200. The chip provides a generational upgrade over the Dimensity 9000, offering the newest Arm cores and greater performance across the board. It’s a worthy alternative to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors.

The D9200 upgrades to Arm’s Makalu-generation CPUs and Immortalis GPU, boosting performance. The GPU adds hardware ray tracing, a PC-graphics feature now entering smartphones. The chip makes big gains in AI and image processing (the former now improves the latter). On the wireless side, it raises 5G data rates and adds support for the draft Wi Fi 7 standard. The processor is already in production, and initial smartphones using it should become available by year-end.

Dimensity chips are popular in mid-premium and lower-price phones but had essentially no share in the premium segment ($500 and up) until the D9000 began shipping a year ago. That model was MediaTek’s first with top-end Arm CPU and GPU cores, offering premium-class performance. It appeared in phones from Asus, Honor (the Huawei spinoff and now the leading vendor in China), OnePlus, Oppo, Realme, Vivo, and Xiaomi.

Although we consider the D9000 a premium processor, some of these phones cost less than $500, indicating MediaTek sells the chip for less than Snapdragon 8. (The company says its OEM customers simply accept lower margins than Qualcomm’s customers.) None of these phone vendors is abandoning Snapdragon for Dimensity. Still, these high-end wins establish a new price tier for MediaTek, and any premium share is incremental. The company hopes the Dimensity 9200 builds on this momentum.