The flagship phone world is in for a shakeup over the next twelve months. MediaTek, the one-time mainstay of mid-range mobile silicon, has just unveiled the Dimensity 9400 – a top-tier chipset that’ll be appearing in a higher number of upcoming smartphones than any of the firm’s previous efforts.
Performance is reportedly up across the board, courtesy of new CPU cores, a faster GPU, and a next-gen NPU dedicated to AI acceleration. A more efficient modem and smarter camera image processing should also give the latest Snapdragon silicon something to worry about.
It uses an all-big core design, just like the outgoing Dimensity 9300. There’s a new Arm Cortex X925 good for 3.62GHz, three Cortex X4 cores running at 3.3GHz, and four Cortex A720 cores, which share 12MB of L3 cache and 10MB of system cache. Simply put, it’s a heck of a lot quicker than last year: MediaTek reckons 35% and 28% in the Geekbench single- and multi-core tests.
Gaming should see a big boost, too, thanks to the 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU. We’re promised 41% faster peak performance and 40% faster ray tracing, while the GFXBench Aztec shows a 31% uplift over the Dimensity 9300 – which was by no means a slouch.
A significant portion of the Dimensity 9400’s 29.1 billion transistors are found in the NPU, which apparently generates Diffusion images twice as fast as the previous generation. It can handle 50 tokens per second on device now, while also being up to 35% more power efficient.
The second-gen 3nm manufacturing process should help extend battery life across the board, with the CPU alone being 40% more power efficient than the Dimensity 9300. The camera ISP should be 14% less power draining when shooting 4K/60p video, too. I thought the older chip was extremely economical when I tested the Vivo X100 Pro (one of my favourite phones of the past twelve months), so any further improvements will be mighty impressive.
First in line for the new silicon will be Oppo. The upcoming Find X8 series will also be the first Oppo flagship in several generations to get a European launch, which bodes well for manufacturer confidence in the new chips. Samsung picking the Dimensity 9300 for the Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra is a big sign of things to come, too.
The rumour that Dimensity 9400 chips are cheaper for phone makers than the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 could also be a factor, though MediaTek reps wouldn’t talk pricing during my briefing.