The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 made its debut in November of last year and featured a unique design – it included four Cortex-X4 prime cores instead of the usual one. It also did away with the little cores, opting for four Cortex-A720 to bring the total core count to eight.
At the opening of a new office building, MediaTek CEO Cai Lixing commended the success of the 9300 and emphasized the growing importance of AI in smartphones.
The CEO also hinted at the upcoming flagship chip, likely named “Dimensity 9400,” which is anticipated to be released in the fourth quarter of this year. This will be the first MediaTek chip manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm node (N3E), while the 9300 was produced on the older N4P node.
While the specific CPU configuration of the Dimensity 9400 has not been confirmed, early rumors suggest that the highest clocked core will be a new Cortex-X5 (which has not yet been officially announced). The middle and bottom cores are expected to remain the same – 3x Cortex-X4 and 4x Cortex-A720.
While we do not yet have information on the clock speeds, and we have not yet seen the N3E node in action (it is expected to be used for the iPhone 16 series), our testing of the 9300 showed excellent stability under load – retaining 80% of its peak power after 40 minutes and settling at 73% after extended use.
This was a remarkable achievement, considering that the design focused on reducing power usage and heat by having just one prime core and numerous little ones. MediaTek demonstrated that concentrating on large cores can be a viable strategy as well.
Moreover, according to the available chart, it is expected that the Dimensity 9400 will have a better NPU with 20%-50% faster generation from Large Language Models like Llama2 7B and 15% faster image generation with Stable Diffusion v1.5.
PS. Sources claim that MediaTek has teamed up with Nvidia to develop a chipset with a GeForce GPU instead of the usual ARM Mali/Immortalis. This sets the stage for an interesting competition against the Exynos 2500, which is reportedly set to feature only one Cortex-X5 (with Cortex-A730 and A520 making up the rest of the CPU) and an AMD-based GPU.
