Nothing Phone 2a chipset revealed: It came down to these three chips

Nothing is continuing its drip-feed of Nothing Phone 2a spec disclosures in the run-up to its March 5 launch. Now, the smartphone brand has revealed the new phone’s processor.

Nothing confirmed in a YouTube video that the Nothing Phone 2a will be powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 7200 Pro processor. This is the first Nothing phone with a MediaTek chipset, following in the footsteps of the Snapdragon 778G Plus and Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 in the Nothing Phone 1 and 2 respectively.

Nothing product marketing manager Raymond Zhu noted in the video that the Dimensity 7200 Pro differs from the standard Dimensity 7200 in a couple of areas. For one, he says certain components such as the display IC chip and modem are roughly 10% more efficient. Nothing also developed some software features specifically for this chipset, such as a Smart Clean feature.

Otherwise, it seems like the Dimensity 7200 Pro is in line with the standard chip. That means we’re expecting a capable CPU (2x Cortex-A715 and 6x Cortex-A510) and a Mali-G610 MC4 GPU.

“We knew MediaTek was a hard sell since Qualcomm is a lot better known (sic) here in the UK, but we couldn’t justify going with a lower-performing processor” Zhu explained.

Interestingly, the representative said that the choice of chipset came down to the Dimensity 7200 Pro, Snapdragon 7s Gen 2, and Snapdragon 782G. But Zhu confirmed that the Snapdragon chips had lower performance than the MediaTek SoC.

Nothing’s clip also showed a graphic (seen at the top) pointing to the Phone 2a packing 12GB of RAM. But it’s unclear if this figure applies to all variants.

Aside from Nothing’s official disclosures, we’ve also recently seen apparent leaked renders for the device. The renders show a phone with a circular camera housing and two cameras sitting side-by-side. Thankfully, it looks like the phone still retains the company’s Glyph lighting.