As a regular consumer, you might not care too much about the specifics of the chip that finds itself inside your smartphone, as long as it performs well enough for you not to complain. For us tech enthusiasts though, the chip matters a whole lot—that’s why new SoC launches are rather exciting.
Today, MediaTek has unveiled a new chip to cater to the upper-midrange segment of the smartphone market—the Dimensity 8400. Utilizing an all big core CPU, its performance is expected to be better than anything else available for phones in its tier. Yep, even Qualcomm might have to bow down for the time being.
While the flagship chips like the Dimensity 9400 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite might get all of the spotlight, chips in the midrange are equally important. If you’re buying a midrange smartphone, you know it might not be able to play AAA mobile games flawlessly, but it should be able to run smoothly and take on moderately performance-intensive tasks like video editing.
With the Dimensity 8400 that was unveiled by MediaTek today, there’s probably no chip in the midrange that will be able to handle those intensive tasks any better. The major selling point of this new chip is that it adopts what is called an “all big core” design, which means that all of the cores that make up the CPU are “big” cores, which means they’re focused on performance and not efficiency. The Dimensity 9400 used the same design.
For clarity, that’s eight Arm Cortex-A725 cores with a top clock speed of 3.25GHz. For a chip that’s in the upper mid-range, that’s very impressive, and it means that any performance promises that it makes are likely to be on the money. The Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 will have to move aside.
Compared to the Dimensity 8300, which used four small cores and four big cores, you might assume that while the 8400 wins in performance, the older chip is better at power saving. That’s not even the case though.
The Dimensity 8400 brings as high as 41% higher multi-core performance while reducing peak power drain by 44%. On top of that, the GPU gets upgraded for nearly 25% more performance at its peak and 42% less power usage. Even 4K HDR video recording will drain less power now. That means more performance and less energy drained.
And of course, it comes with an NPU to take care of all of that AI magic onboard. With the upgrade, it supports all mainstream AI models with faster operations and better power efficiency.
The Redmi Turbo 4 Will Be The First Device With The New Chip
If you’re wondering when you’ll be able to get the chip, it’s going to be next year, unsurprisingly. It will ship in the Redmi Turbo 4, and while there’s no exact launch date, it is expected in the first week of January. The device is going to be China-exclusive and rebranded as the Poco F7 or Poco X7 Pro for international audiences.
