The Dimensity 9400 will be MediaTek's first 3nm chip and is said to utilize TSMC's second-generation lithography technology, which will improve energy efficiency and bring other benefits. As for when the SoC will be officially unveiled, the company's CEO Rick Tsai said that it will be launched in the fourth quarter of this year and will enhance artificial intelligence capabilities to rival other high-end smartphone chips.
In addition to Dimensity9400, we will also see Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8Gen4, which is said to also be mass-produced using TSMC's advanced 3nm process.
Dimensity9400 will use the same CPU cluster as Dimensity9300, which also does not have high-efficiency cores; the advanced 3-nanometer process helps reduce power consumption.
While the MediaTek CEO did not provide a performance comparison, reports claim that the Dimensity 9400 will come with improved AI features. The image below also shares an alleged CPU cluster, showing that unlike this year's Qualcomm, MediaTek will continue to use ARM's CPU design, but upgrade it to Cortex-X5. One rumor, however, states that the entire CPU cluster will be made up of more than just Cortex-X5 cores, but does mention that the Dimensity 9400 will not feature any efficiency cores, which is the configuration used by the Dimensity 9300, resulting in improved multi-core performance.
As for advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, the Dimensity9400 may far exceed the 33 billion parameters supported by the Dimensity9300 in terms of large language models when performing tasks on the device. However, like its predecessor, we may see the Dimensity 9400 get LPDDR5T memory support, as running artificial intelligence on the device requires faster and more efficient memory.
Before the start of 2024, MediaTek announced that it has cooperated with TSMC to develop the world's first 3-nanometer chipset, which reduces power consumption by 32% and will begin mass production in 2024.
Although MediaTek did not explicitly mention the name Dimensity 9400, the Taiwanese company is likely referring to its flagship SoC. We recently reported on the Geekbench6 single-core and multi-core benchmarks of Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which were said to be faster than both Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Dimensity 9300. We expect that Dimensity9400 will achieve the same performance leap, but to see its actual performance, we have to wait until its official release in the fourth quarter of 2024.