Leaked roadmap reveals when to expect MediaTek's first 5nm chipset and who will get it first

Nearly a week ago we told you that MediaTek will soon introduce its latest flagship chips. The Dimensity 1200 and 1100 will be unveiled Wednesday and will be manufactured using the 6nm node. Right now the Apple A14 Bionic, the Kirin 9000, the Snapdragon 888, and the Exynos 2100 are the only 5nm chips rolling off of assembly lines. The process node is determined by the transistor density and the more transistors that can fit in a square mm, the more powerful and energy-efficient a chip is. A leaked roadmap released by tipster Digital Chat Station suggests that phones made by Oppo and Vivo (and possibly Redmi) will be first to use the components.

The roadmap also revealed that MediaTek's first 5nm chip should be released during the first quarter of 2022. Given the moniker of the Dimensity 2000, Oppo and Vivo will be first to use the chipset with an independent Honor also named. This chip is rumored to use three cores not yet unveiled by ARM: the high-performance Cortex-X2, the Cortex-A79 CPU, and

the Mali G79 GPU core. The Dimensity 1200, by the way, is based on ARM's current top-of-the-line Cortex-A78 CPU core.

The Cortex-A79 (aka the Matterhorn Core) delivers a small increase in performance. Comparing it to an older core like 2016's A73, the performance hike is two and a half times. Next year (2022), the top core will be known as the Makalu Generation and it will deliver a 30% gain in performance over the Mattehorn. It will drop support for 32-bit software and will run 64-bit only.

We should hear more about MediaTek's plans on Wednesday so be sure to check in on Wednesday or Thursday.