As one foot falls, another will follow and that’s how it is with Qualcomm and MediaTek in recent years with their flagship chip announcements. With the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 already unveiled, we’ve been waiting to see what MediaTek’s latest Dimensity flagship chipset would bring to the table. Spoiler Alert: MediaTek went big this year and I mean, really BIG.
In recent years we’ve grown accustomed to phone processors having a number of performance cores for the heavy lifting such as playing games and a few efficiency cores that took care of the more mundane, low-priority tasks such as syncing with other devices and notifications. Those efficiency cores would help with power usage and ensure that improved battery life was achieved. More recently, we’ve seen both Qualcomm and MediaTek tweak the formula with the addition of a super-performance core in addition to a few normal cores and some efficiency cores. MediaTek said in a briefing that it was confident that the Cortex-A720 cores would not impact battery life negatively.
This year, MediaTek is forging its own path with the launch of a new chip strategy that not only eschews the presence of efficiency cores. That’s right, the Dimensity 9300 flagship chipset features four Cortex-X4 cores clocked at up to 3.25GHz and four Cortex-A720 cores at up to 2GHz, with not a single efficiency core in sight.
“The Dimensity 9300 is MediaTek’s most powerful flagship chip yet, bringing a huge boost in raw computing power to flagship smartphones with our groundbreaking All Big Core design,” said Joe Chen, President at MediaTek. “This unique architecture, combined with our upgraded on-chip AI Processing Unit, will usher in a new era of generative AI applications as developers push the limits with edge AI and hybrid AI computing capabilities.”
As you might hope with a new chip, the Dimensity 9300 benefits from a number of improvements including a 15% boost in single-core performance and a 40% boost in multi-core performance, which is a significant number in itself.
Besides the chip architecture which is certainly unusual, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 packs in a lot more AI than its predecessor did. A whole lot more, in fact. The processing power of the 7th-gen APU 790 AI processor is 8 times faster than its previous incarnation. With support for Large Language Models (LLMs) with up to 7 billion parameters , the chip is the first to support on-device LoRA Fusion and is also 45% more power efficient.
MediaTek’s Immortalis G720 graphics processor achieves a massive 46% performance boost with the same power usage as the GPU on the Dimensity 9200. Combines with the 2nd-generation hardware ray tracing engine, the Dimensity 9300 can product console-level global illiumination effects at a smooth 60 FPS while letting users game and video stream at the same time.
In a nutshell, the Dimensity 9300 packs the following:
● Big core power: The Dimensity 9300 is built on TSMC’s third generation 4nm process with four
Arm Cortex-X4 cores with operating speeds of up to 3.25GHz and four Cortex-A720 cores
operating up to 2.0GHz to maximize performance.
● Faster display speeds: The chipset supports WQHD at 180Hz and 4K up to 120Hz to provide
stunning visuals, along with dual active display support for foldable form factors.
● Seamless 5G connectivity: The 5G R16 modem supports 4CC-CA Sub-6GHz and 8CC-CA mmWave with MediaTek’s UltraSave 3.0+ technology for improved power efficiency.
● Speedy memory: Dimensity 9300 supports LPDDR5T 9600Mbps memory, currently the highest
speed available.
We should see the first Dimensity 9300-powered flagships launching as soon as in the next couple of weeks, and we’ll also find out more about the new BIG chip during the MediaTek Summit which is being held on November 16.
