MediaTek announces the Dimensity 9400, its first chip engraved in 3 nm

Taiwanese MediaTek today announces the chip that will need to be monitored in high-end Android terminals of 2025: the Dimensity 9400. Intended for the most expensive smartphones, this chip is the first from the brand to be engraved in 3 nm and more precisely in N3E, the most energy efficient engraving process from the other Taiwanese, TSMC. And it’s far from being a detail. This engraving is one of the levers which allows it to display very significant performance gains, particularly in the graphics area.

While the Dimensity 9300 integrated 22 billion transistors, this 9400 edition benefits from no less than 29 billion transistors. An additional calculation unit to which are added improvements here and there, leading to up to 41% more performance in peak GPU power. If the architecture and drivers follow, it promises!

100% ARM CPU and GPU architectures

While Qualcomm designs not only its GPU cores (Adreno) and now its CPU cores (Oryon), MediaTek remains faithful to ARM and uses the brand’s architectures, namely the X4 and A720 generations for the two quartets of CPU cores and the twelve Immortalis G-925 cores for the GPU.

Assuring that “for the moment we have no added value to bring to ARM architectures“, the European executives of MediaTek with whom we spoke explained to us that they “focused on ensuring the best possible integration“. Champion of mobile chips (MediaTek is the world number 1 in terms of volume of chips delivered), the Taiwanese has refined its chip and its engraving to ensure performance gains at all levels compared to its previous chip.

A gain of up to +35% in single-core computing, +28% in multi-core. And graphics performance gains of +41% (peak), +40% in ray-tracing and energy efficiency of up to 40%. The question remains whether it is capable of maintaining these performances over time (sustained performance, in the jargon).

An 8th generation NPU

Just like its competitor Qualcomm, MediaTek is (very) stingy with details regarding its NPU, called very “poetically” NPU 890. A sub-element of its chip that the firm’s executives nevertheless assure is “one of the major pillars of our mobile strategy.

Professing their leadership in the field – “we are in our 8th generation” – MediaTek promises a lot. The NPU 890 is touted as the industry’s first mobile AI agent, the first capable of generating quality AI videos directly on the mobile and the first capable of performing local LoRA training (LoRA for Low-Rank Adaptationare small models that make slight modifications to a larger AI model).

And MediaTek explains that beyond personal assistants, its NPU will therefore be usable to create content without going through the cloud.to improve latency and above all guarantee the protection of user privacy“.

Wi-Fi 7, 5G release 17 and triple screen

Specialist in connectivity, MediaTek has taken care of the network part. With the integration of three-band Wi-Fi 7 (and consumption down by up to 50% all the same) and a 5G modem that adheres to the very latest specification (called “release 17”). Here again, the promises are around speed (30% faster thanks to AI algorithms) and up to 13% energy savings.

Big news in these classic bullet presentation slides, we noted a “ready for trifoldables”. Understand three-screen folding smartphones here, like the Huawei Mate XT. To do this, the chip integrates three MIPI-DSI interfaces responsible for controlling the display panels.

The whole industry interested, Oppo first on the scene

According to the company’s European teams that we met, with this generation of chip, MediaTek aims to make a big impact. For Robert Moffat, “the entire industry wants alternatives. For years, there was only one player in control of the high-end smartphone chip market. With our Dimensity 9400, we meet the needs of our partners.“.

This player is obviously the American giant Qualcomm, in control of the overwhelming majority of flagships for more than a decade. Until now, the Dimensity 9000 range had only managed to break through in a few terminals, and often only in certain regions of the world. “Dimensity will be our first chip to equip very high-end terminals with global distribution“, we assure at MediaTek.

The first of the lot being Oppo’s future gem, the future Oppo Find X8. A terminal that a representative of the Chinese brand came to formalize on stage during the embargoed presentation of the Dimensity to the European press. And of which all the contours will be revealed “during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next February 2025“.