MediaTek has unveiled the Dimensity 7200, a new mid-range phone chipset intended to directly compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 1.
The 7200 is the first in the company’s new 7000 series, sitting below the recent Dimensity 9200 and 8200 chips.
It still has a lot in common with its big brothers. For starters, it’s made on the same 2nd Gen TSMC 4nm process as the top-end Dimensity 9200, which should help ensure both power and efficiency.
The CPU design is quite different though. There’s no super-fast main core here: instead there are two Cortex-A715 performance cores clocked at 2.8GHz, flanked by six slower Cortex-A510 efficiency cores.
That means it won’t deliver the same outright performance as MediaTek’s higher-end silicon, although the company is optimistic about its competitiveness, saying it can deliver 10% better single-core performance to rival Snapdragon 7 Gen. 1.
MediaTek
The chip includes a modem for 5G support, though it’s limited to bandwidths below 6GHz – the typical range outside of the US. The latest Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 standards are included at least.
MediaTek has been slow to adopt the faster but shorter-range mmWave, which is currently only widely available in the US, but now includes this support on its flagship chips. It still ships the majority of its chips to Chinese manufacturers, for release in Asia and Europe, so it’s understandable that the 7200 doesn’t seem to be focused on the US.
Otherwise, these are the usual specs that we can’t put to the test until we have a Dimensity 7200-powered phone to review.
You can expect a Mali G610 GPU, with the company’s HyperEngine 5.0 technology to help optimize gaming performance. It can power displays up to 144Hz at Full HD+ resolutions, with HDR support to boot . A dedicated AI processor will help with photography and other heavy machine learning processes.
Cameras up to 200Mp will be supported – as seen recently on the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra – as well as 14-bit 4K HDR video capture.
So when will we actually see this in phones? MediaTek says the hardware is currently in production, with the first handsets expected by the end of March – meaning we could even see some revealed at this month’s MWC show in Barcelona.
