Earlier this year, MediaTek launched the Dimensity 9300, which was an unusual design – instead of one Cortex-X4 prime core, it had four. In addition, it skipped the little cores altogether in favor of four Cortex-A720 cores.
CEO Cai Lixing attended the opening of a new office building and spoke highly of the 9300, adding that AI will become increasingly important in smartphones.
Moreover, the CEO teased the next flagship chip, tentatively dubbed “Dimensity 9400”, which is expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year. It will be MediaTek’s first chip produced on TSMC’s 3nm node (N3E), the 9300 was manufactured on the older N4P node.
Here’s what the early rumors say about the Dimensity 9400’s CPU configuration. The new Cortex-X5 will be the highest-clocked core. It is equipped with 3x Cortex-X4 cores and 4x Cortex-A720 cores.
In addition, we don’t know the clock speeds and haven’t seen the N3E node in action (it will be used for the iPhone 16 series). After 40 minutes of heavy use, the 9300 maintained 80% of its peak power, and after a longer period, this decreased to 73%.
Considering that the whole point of having one prime core and several little ones was to reduce power consumption and heat, that was impressive. Furthermore, MediaTek has shown that concentrating on large cores can be a viable strategy as well.
Regardless, the Dimensity 9400 is expected to have a better NPU as well with 20%-50% faster Llama2 7B generation and 15% faster image generation with Stable Diffusion v1.5.
MediaTek is reportedly partnering with Nvidia to develop a chipset that uses a GeForce GPU instead of the usual ARM Mali/Immortalis.Exynos 2500 is reportedly going to have a single Cortex-X5 processor (with Cortex-A730 and A520 making up the rest of the CPU) and an AMD-based GPU.
