MediaTek's Snapdragon-7-bothering 5G eight-core Arm chip for modest mobes jets into Europe this month The mid-range smartphone world is enjoying a period of sustained growth, as price-sensitive customers swerve expensive flagships and pick something more modest. Hoping to exploit this market is chip designer MediaTek, which will bring its 5G-capable Dimensity 800 silicon to Europe following its Chinese introduction earlier this …
... but how many people can use 5G?
Here in the USA you're lucky to get 4G. I guess there might be 5G somewhere in San Fran or New York or L.A. or etc., but realistically it doesn't exist for 99.999999% of people. It's like you're advertising floating cars or smell-a-vision. Sure... we'll get there... one day.
MediaTek is largely known for its entry-level Helio system-on-chips
MediaTek is also known for making laptop components whose driver are a pain in the ... for Linux users.
They are the usual Chinese conglomerate making the dirty work on behalf of the US corporations.
The Dimensity 820 is probably intended to compete against a Snapdragon 765G. Dimensity wins on performance but I suspect Snapdragon will win on battery life/packaging due to better thermals and modem.
The 765G was around $60 but has already been dropped to $40 so the Dimensity 820 is likely to be around that level already. The likely manufacturing cost for each chip is $15.
While this all looks good for the consumer, the question is what will happen to the premium end of the SoC market if the majority of mobile devices move to more than capable mid-range chips that are typically $100/SoC cheaper.
I have it's sibling, the Dimensity 1000c, in a T-Mobile LG Velvet. The compute speed and efficiency is excellent for a mid-ranger and the radio reception is amazing. It seems to always have a 5G signal except when it's indoors near an LTE picocell.
The downside so far is that video playback is oversharpened to the point where it's a complete mess of halos and clipped pixels. I'm not sure if that's the MediaTek decoder or if LG has shoved a very dumb kernel filter.
I'm sorry but there's a very good reason Qualcomm are the market leaders: Mediatek is just so half-arsed. If the GPS will lock without phoning home to some god-awful Chinese SUPL server, something else will be broken to the point of uselessness. Couple that with the usual bean-counter engineering, half-arsed bootloaders that brick if you look at them a bit funny and cobbled-together kernels in devices that use this dross and you have landfill mobiles aplenty.
Avoid like the plague.
I've had plenty of half-assed Qualcomm phones too. I'm especially not a fan of what appears to be artificial aging. Have you noticed that Qualcomm phones have weaker reception after each software update? I've had two phones regain reception after rooting and downgrading the radio firmware.
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