Dimensity 9400 coming in Q4 with one Cortex-X5 and three X4 cores
The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 launched in November of last year and it was an odd design – it packed four Cortex-X4 prime cores, instead of the usual one. And it skipped the little cores altogether, using four Cortex-A720 to bring the core count to eight.
MediaTek CEO Cai Lixing attended the opening of a new office building and spoke highly of the success of the 9300, adding that AI will become increasingly more important for smartphones.
The CEO also teased the next flagship chip, tentatively dubbed “Dimensity 9400”, which is expected in the fourth quarter of this year. This will be the first MediaTek built on TSMC’s 3nm node (N3E), the 9300 was fabbed on the older N4P node.
Now, the CPU configuration of the Dimensity 9400 has not been officially confirmed, but here’s what the early rumors are saying. The highest clocked core will be a new Cortex-X5 (which is yet to be officially announced). The middle and bottom cores remain the same – 3x Cortex-X4 and 4x Cortex-A720.
We don’t know the clock speeds yet and we haven’t seen the N3E node in action (it’s expected to be used for the iPhone 16 series). In our testing, the 9300 showed very good stability under load – retaining 80% of its peak power after 40 minutes and settling at 73% after longer use.
That was impressive to see, considering that the whole point of having just one prime core and several little ones was to reduce power usage and heat. MediaTek proved that focusing on large cores is a viable strategy too.
Anyway, as you can see in the chart, the Dimensity 9400 is expected to have a better NPU as well with 20%-50% faster generation from Large Language Models like Llama2 7B and 15% faster image generation with Stable Diffusion v1.5.
PS. reports claim that MediaTek has partnered with Nvidia to build a chipset with a GeForce GPU instead of the usual ARM Mali/Immortalis. This will make for an interesting fight against the Exynos 2500, which will reportedly feature just one Cortex-X5 (with Cortex-A730 and A520 making up the rest of the CPU) and an AMD-based GPU.
