Taiwan’s MediaTek has announced its new flagship 5G mobile chipset, the Dimensity 9400. The 9400 is built on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process. Apple too has relied on the 3nm technology for its latest A18 chips which are present in the iPhone 16 series.
MediTek claims that the new chipset is “up to 40 per cent more power-efficient” than its predecessor, the 9300.
The Dimensity 9400 comprises one Arm Cortex-X925 core running at 3.62GHz, along with three Arm Cortex-X4 and four Cortex-A720 cores.
The company says that this combination results in 35 per cent faster single-core performance and 28 per cent faster multi-core performance compared to the 9300.
The chipset also includes Arm’s new 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU with 40 per cent faster ray tracing.
But the major advantage of this chipset is that it is built to support AI-enabled smartphones.
The chipset features MediaTek’s own eighth-generation NPU with support for training lightweight AI models on-device, with “80 per cent faster large language model prompt performance.”
It also supports AI video generation and provides a developer framework for creating agentic applications. Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can act autonomously and handle tasks, make decisions and interact with the environment.
The new chipset are also reported to be capable of performing complex tasks previously limited to cloud data-center servers, such as solving quadratic equations from a single image and transforming static photos into dynamic video clips, claimed Yenchi Lee, general manager of the wireless communication business unit of MediaTek, reported Nikkei Asia.
Also, if other manufacturers decide to go the way of Huawei with tri-fold devices, the 9400 supports scaling content for those extended screens too.
Set to available in the current quarter, the company’s high-end chips are usually used in flagship devices from Chinese OEMs such as Vivo and Oppo.
MediaTek is the largest smartphone chip supplier by shipments, with a market share of more than 35 per cent for 2023 and the first half of 2024, according to data by Counterpoint Research.
MediaTek’s decision to build chipsets to support AI functionality is crucial when you consider that smartphones equipped with on-device generative AI capabilities will account for about 18 per cent of the market this year, primarily in the premium flagship segment, according to Parv Sharma, senior analyst with Counterpoint Research. That percentage is expected to rise to 54 per cent by 2028 as the average price point of AI-enabled smartphones decrease.
MediaTek’s rival Qualcomm, whose chips are used by the likes of Samsung, is set to launch its latest AI chipset later this month.
