If you follow the tech space closely, you would, by now, understand that the way forward is 5G. Every other manufacturer has jumped on the 5G bandwagon now. The upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note20 series will all come with 5G support out-of-the-box. 5G is not here yet, but the devices are leaping ahead; “just in case,” they say.

At this point of time, there is only a few companies in the world that makes chipsets that supports 5G functionality. Well, most major ones anyway. HUAWEI, Samsung, and Qualcomm make 5G chipsets that fits all kinds of budget.

There is another manufacturer of chips that we forgot about though. Well, not forgot about, just that they have not been exactly chatty about their products. That manufacturer is MediaTek. If you have not heard of them before, where have you been living all your life?

For your benefit though, MediaTek is one of the major chipset manufacturers in the big world that is the smartphone industry. Their chips can be found on some very reasonably priced Android devices. Recently they launched their new 5G chipset series starting with the Dimensity 1000. The Dimensity 1000 is MediaTek’s latest flagship class chipset offering with 5G connectivity. To address the mid-range 5G smartphone market they have just introduced the Dimensity 720 System on a Chip (SoC) today.

The Dimensity 720 SoC is still a 7nm process chip with 5G connectivity like Dimensity 1000 from MediaTek. The difference is in price and what it can do. It is still no slouch though.

The construction of the MediaTek Dimensity 720 SoC is still quite traditional in the chipset context. The chip is still running on ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, nothing new there. There are two big ARM Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2GHz for all the big, heavy operations. Then there are six littler ARM Cortex-A55 cores that clocks at 2GHz as well for all the lighter operations. This is effectively an Octa-Core processor in this case. Graphics are handled by ARM Mail G57 GPU integrated within the SoC

Here are everything else you need to know about the chipset:

• 90Hz refresh rate support with HDR10+
• up to 64-Megapixel single sensor, or 20-Megapixel + 16-Megapixel dual camera set up
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) image enhancement with improved AI Processing Unit (APU)
• Integrated Voice Wakeup technology for less power consumption on voice activations
• dual-mic support with noise suppression for voice assistants
• LPDDR4X
• UFS 2.2
• Dual 5G and 4G SIM support (sub 6GHz networks)

There is no information on which devices will come with the new MediaTek Dimensity 720 SoC just yet. Then again, there are no devices in Malaysia that is sporting the Dimensity 1000 SoC just yet too. More information on the Dimensity 720 can be found on their website.