A couple of weeks on after the debut of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the other major player in the mobile platform scene has responded with its own next generation flagship mobile system-on-chip. MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9300, and it features a pretty stark departure from its rivals in how its been designed.
Unlike other flagship mobile chips like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or Google Tensor G3 which uses a prime core with multiple performance and efficiency cores, the Dimensity 9300—built on the 4nm process—drops the little cores altogether. Instead, MediaTek has given it a Cortex-X4 prime core running at 3.25GHz flanked by three more Cortex-X4 cores running at 2.85GHz with a further four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.0GHz. There’s also 18MB of L3+SLC cache, 29% more than its predecessor, and supports LPDDR5T memory running at up to 9600Mbps speeds along with UFS 4.0 storage support.
According to MediaTek, even though they ditched the efficient Cortex-A5xx cores in the Dimensity 9300 altogether, you can expect similar if not better power efficiency thanks to the Cortex-A720 using less power than the Cortex-A520 in its minimum power state. Overall, the Taiwanese giant claims a 15% improvement in single core performance and up to 40% increased performance in multi core tasks. It’s also up to 33% more power efficient in multi-core workloads compared to the previous generation.
As for its GPU, the Dimensity 9300 comes with a 12-core ARM Immortalis-G720 GPU, with support for hardware ray-tracing that MediaTek says will deliver console-level global illumination effects at 60FPS. Compared against the previous generation Dimensity 9200 with its Immortalis-G715, the Dimensity 9300 offers 46% more performance while also able to match its predecessor at 40% less power consumption.
Just like its competition, the Dimensity 9300 packs some AI chops here too, with a new APU 790 AI processor. MediaTek claims it’s up to eight times faster than before, with the APU 790 able to generate images via Stable Diffusion in less than a second as well as support for large language models with up to 13 billion parameters. The Dimensity 9300 also now supports always-on HDR capture at 4K, the new Ultra HDR format along with 4K AI noise reduction processing on RAW photos and video, as well as displays of up to 4K at 120Hz and WQHD at 180Hz. There’s support for Bluetooth 5.4 and WiFi 7 speeds of up to 6.5Gbps as well as sub-6GHz 5G connectivity.
As for when we can expect smartphones powered by the Dimensity 9300 to appear, MediaTek says the first devices to feature their new chipset will be available in the market by the end of the year. For more about the Dimensity 9300, you can check out its product page on the MediaTek website here.
