MediaTek wants to Take on Qualcomm with its Newest Chip
While many have dismissed MediaTek’s prospects in the consumer electronics product space in the past, the company has continued to improve on its work with its Dimensity series chipsets. That said, the much-awaited Dimensity 9400 chip is now official, which MediaTek claims is optimized for edge-AI software, alongside a host of other use cases.
A 3nm chip, the Dimensity 9400 features an “All Big Core” design built on Arm’s v9.2 CPU architecture, and integrates one Arm Cortex-X925 core operating over 3.62GHz with 3x Cortex-X4 and 4x Cortex-A720 cores. MediaTek says that thus design offers 35% faster single-core performance and 28% faster multi-core performance, and is also 40% more power-efficient. It’s made by TSMC, if you were wondering.
As with a lot of chips from different brands this year, generative AI takes center stage with the 9400. MediaTek says that it is the first-ever mobile chip that offers on-device LoRA training, on-device video generation, as well as developer support for Agentic AI (more on this in a bit). There’s 80% faster large language model (LLM) prompt performance, and MediaTek adds that it’s up to 35% more power efficient than last year’s 9300.
As for MediaTek’s Agentic AI Engine (DAE), the company says that it’s designed to run traditional AI applications into “sophisticated” agentic AI applications, and adds that it’s working with developers to offer a more uniform interface between AI agents, third-party APKs, and models for both edge AI and cloud services.
Fore gaming, there’s a 12-core Arm Immortalis-G925 unit that delivers up to 40% faster raytracing performance, and this is joined by opacity micromaps support for more life-like effects. MediaTek claims that the 9400’s GPU also offers 41% peak performance boost with up to 44% power efficiency, and there’s also support for HyperEngine technology for better visual quality.
For imaging, MediaTek’s Imagiq 1090 allows the Dimensity 9400 to capture HDR video throughout the entire zoom range, and there’s also Smooth Zoom technology for capturing moving subjects. Other features include a newer 5G modem, a 4nm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth combo chip, support for 5G/4G Dual SIM Dual Active, as well as compatibility with tri-fold device form factors.
MediaTek says that buyers can expect the first Dimensity 9400-powered phones to arrive later in Q4 2024.
Source: MediaTek