MediaTek has lifted the lid on its next-gen flagship chipset for smartphones dubbed the Dimensity 9400.
The new chipset, expected to be featured in upcoming flagship devices from Oppo and more, offers a massive boost to performance that could make it the best-performing chip around, all while being more power-efficient than its predecessor.
There are also new AI smarts powered by an upgraded NPU, and the chipset also supports some new, interesting form factors.
Intrigued? You should be! Here’s everything you need to know about the Dimensity 9400 chipset, including which phones it’ll likely appear in soon. If you’re interested in how it compares to the competition, check out our Dimensity 9400 vs Dimensity 9300 and Dimensity 9400 vs Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 comparisons.
The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 is the chipmaker’s top-end flagship smartphone-focused chipset for 2025, and it brings with it a swathe of upgrades.
First and foremost, the chipset once again uses the All-Big-Core design first introduced on last year’s Dimensity 9300 with a focus on performance. More specifically, the chipset is comprised of one Arm Cortex X925 core, three Cortex X4 cores and four Cortex A720 cores, combined with a 12-core Immortalis G925 GPU and MediaTek’s 8th-gen 890 NPU.
That essentially means that the Dimensity 9400 is a beefy chipset with impressive performance. MediaTek claims that there’s a 35% uptick in single-core CPU performance while multi-core performance is up by 28%, though it’s the GPU’s 41% boost to peak performance while being 44% more efficient that’s more notable.
MediaTek has even shared early benchmarking scores from an engineering sample, with Geekbench 6 scores of 3055 and 9600 in single- and multi-core tests respectively. If that’s what’s to be expected from 9400-equipped devices, they could compete with Apple’s top-end iPhone 16 Pro Max which scored 3338 and 8167 respectively in the same tests.
Though it’s arguably the 8th-gen 890 NPU that’s the star of this year’s show, offering a massive 2x uptick in generating images on-device, while there is a 70% boost to how quickly LLMs can handle prompts, all while being 35% more efficient.
The latter is likely down to the NPU’s new Performance and Flexible core split, allowing the NPU to use performant or power-friendly cores to run AI processes depending on what’s required.
The upgraded NPU also allows for what MediaTek calls the introduction of ‘Agentic AI’. While MediaTek was coy about specific examples of what Agentic AI could do at its announcement, it claims that it’s providing manufacturers with a framework to deliver more useful AI ‘agents’ on-device to solve more complex problems, all without having to resort to using the cloud.
Despite all this going on, MediaTek’s flagship chipset still manages to be 40% more efficient overall than its predecessor, which should hopefully translate to boosted battery life from Dimensity 9400-equipped devices in the near future.
It’s not just about processing power however; the chipset also brings with it an improved Imagiq 1090 Camera ISP that offers support for features like full-range HDR zoom, GenAI-powered super zoom, smooth video zoom and up to 8K@60fps video capture.
It also supports higher-res WQHD+ screens at up to 180Hz, as well as support for tri-foldable displays like that of the Huawei Mate XT, and users can also take advantage of tri-band Wi-Fi 7 support where possible.
Which smartphones will use the Dimensity 9400?
The Dimensity 9400 was only announced in early October 2024, so there aren’t any smartphones that actually use the chipset – yet, anyway.
Coinciding with the reveal of the flagship 2025 chipset, phone manufacturer Oppo confirmed that the chipset would feature on the global release of its next flagship smartphone collection, the Oppo Find X8 series.
It’s unclear whether it’ll be a specific phone within that series or available across the entire collection (previous Find ranges have comprised of regular and Pro/Ultra models), but we may not have that long to find out.
While we don’t have confirmation from other smartphone manufacturers, we can expect phones and tablets from the likes of Xiaomi, Vivo and possibly even Samsung to release Dimensity 9400-equipped devices sometime in the near future – most use the Dimensity 9300 in some form in 2024, anyway.
