A little boost: that’s what the + added to the Dimensity 9300 launched at the end of last year means. In the style of Qualcomm, the Taiwanese MediaTek therefore offers its high-end chip for smartphones in a “Plus” version, which is only a small improvement on the previous generation.
No new design, new cores or new graphics unit: the structure of the Dimensity 9300+ is the same as that of the Dimensity 9300. We therefore find four large Cortex X4 cores, four powerful Cortex A720 cores as well as a 12-core GPU. ARM Immortalis generation cores. If refinement operations took place here and there, the bulk of the work of MediaTek engineers consisted of improving the manufacturing processes – still using the 3rd generation of TSMC4 node (4 nm) – and increasing the maximum frequency of the core X4 prime.
Among the four X4 cores, MediaTek already pushed the best to 3.25 GHz on the previous version. This now increases to 3.4 GHz. A (small) extra power that should speed up the heaviest and most resource-intensive applications, including the most advanced video games. As with the Snapdragon + versions, this Dimensity 9300+ is therefore not a revolution, but a simple refresh for terminals either high-end or targeting gamers – we are thinking in particular of the Asian markets.
This target gaming is obvious when reading the promises on this side: MediaTek claims that “The most popular online games are displayed at 90 fps” and that the GPU manages the ray-tracing of many titles “up to 60 fps”. It’s a shame, however, that the Dimensity does not seem to benefit from additional GPU power, since it is satisfied with the same number and the same nature of calculation units, at frequencies a priori similar. Let us point out, however, that MediaTek is not ignoring the AI trend, and announces that its chipset provides support for many language models, such as Llama 2 and 3, but also Gemini Nano. Enough to hope for the arrival of innovative features in future generations of smartphones.
At the time of writing, neither MediaTek nor the smartphone manufacturers have announced a terminal equipped with the Dimensity 9300+, which should however not be long.