MediaTek launches the Dimensity 9300. This new chip for smartphones is intended to compete with Qualcomm’s recently announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. To do this, the chip designer combines two different types of performance cores.

MediaTek is launching its latest, most powerful mobile chip: the Dimensity 9300. This processor runs from TSMC’s 4nm+ production line and is expected to deliver excellent performance. For this purpose, MediaTek abandons the Big.Little configuration, in which powerful and economical cores work together on one chip, and replaces it with Big.Bigger. MediaTek itself speaks of one Pretty bigArchitecture, with an emphasis on horsepower.

Four large cores and four (less) large cores

The Dimensity 9300 combines four very powerful Arm Cortex-X4 cores with a clock frequency of up to 3.25 GHz with four Cortex-A720 cores that reach a maximum of 2 GHz. The marketing team certainly played a role here, because in our eyes we can still clearly see which cores are powerful and which are aimed at greater economy and efficiency. The fact is that these smaller centers still have quite a few horses in their stables.

Main competitor Qualcomm uses a single Cortex-X4 in its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, supported by five Cortex-A720 cores and two smaller Cortex-A520 cores, which MediaTek lacks. MediaTek claims that its configuration offers fifteen percent more performance for the same power consumption or 33 percent less power for the same workload. That’s a nice claim that MediaTek backs up with its own benchmarks.

GPU and AI APU

The GPU on this chip is also said to be significantly more powerful compared to the previous generation. MediaTek itself claims a jump of 46 percent compared to the Dimensity 9200. Graphics performance comes from an Arm Immortalis G720. In our opinion, with a name like that you can only generate more images per second. Whether the GPU can keep up with the Adreno in the Snapdragon is an open question. Traditionally, Qualcomm has an advantage in this regard.

Just like Qualcomm, MediaTek also plays the AI ​​card with integrated accelerator functions. To do this, let’s take a look at the APU 790 AI processor. It contains something called MediaTek INT4 mixed precision quantizationTechnology that then works together NeuroPilot Fusion-Memory compression to use memory bandwidth more efficiently. There is no flux capacitor. This means that even larger models fit well into the storage, they say. Anyone who wants to operate neural networks on their cell phone can definitely look forward to the next generation of smartphones. We suspect it will be mostly niche.

Hotspot

The MediaTek multi-link hotspot technology seems to us to be a nice icing on the cake. This should drastically speed up tethering via smartphone. This is interesting in our country as Belgians are generally more inclined to connect devices on the go via a hotspot on their phone rather than an additional SIM card.

The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is clearly a powerful chip designed for flagship phones. In our region, premium hardware makers generally favor Qualcomm, so the chip will likely be a little less ubiquitous than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Still, we suspect this SoC will easily power high-end phones in the coming year .