Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek today announced its latest flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9400.
Built on TSMC’s 2nd generation 3nm process, the new system-on-a-chip (SoC) boasts notable improvements over last year’s Dimensity 9300.
The best bits of the Dimensity 9400
Everything about the new Dimenisty 9400 is faster and more efficient, as expected from a new SoC. It uses a 1+3+4 cluster design, translating to one super fast performance core for single-thread applications, three slightly slower cores for multi-threaded workloads, and four efficiency cores for background tasks.
For the super fast performance core, MediaTek is using a new Cortex-X925 CPU from Arm which clocks in at 3.62GHz. It’s joined by three Cortex-X4 cores with a maximum frequency of 3.3GHz and four 2.4GHz Cortex-A720 cores.
MediaTek claims its new Dimensity 9400 chip offers a 15% IPC (instruction per cycle) increase. That equates to 35% and 28% increases over the Dimensity 9300 in single-core and multi-core performance, respectively, according to the company. On top of the speed increase, the company says the new chip offers “up to 40% more power efficiency.”
MediaTek’s Immortalis GPU also receives an upgrade. The 12-core Immortalis G925 boasts “up to 41% faster peak performance” and “up to 40% faster raytracing performance” over the previous flagship while also being “up to 44% more power efficient.”
On top of CPU and GPU upgrades, MediaTek says its new NPU 890 should use 35% less power than its predecessor. More impressive than that (admittedly dependant on who you’re asking), are the ‘world firsts’ that MediaTek is claiming with the Dimensity 9400.
Those include the world’s first chip with an Agentic AI engine, the world’s first chip capable of “high-quality on-device video generation”, and the world’s first chip capable of on-device LoRA training. We’ve included links to the things we also needed to look up.
Lastly, and also a ‘world’s first’ as it happens, is the new ISP (image signal processor) called Imagiq 1090. Here, MediaTek is claiming this to be the only flagship chip “that can enable HDR video capture throughout the entire zoom range.” That has to be big news for at least a few people.
There are plenty of other improvements to the Dimensity 9400 which you can read up on here (you nerd).
As for when we’re likely to see the new chipset in action, that’s harder to ascertain. Seeing as there aren’t any phones locally available (outside of grey importers) with MediaTek’s last flagship the chances are slim that we’ll see any crop up soon.
Elsewhere though, Oppo and Vivo are usually the first to feature the flagship chipset in their flagship smartphones. These are due before the end of the year. So that’s something, we guess.
