MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 AP outperforms Apple's A18 Pro in multi-core benchmark test

Next month we are going to see some powerful application processors unveiled including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and MediaTek's Dimensity 9400. The former will sport two Cortex-X925 high-performance CPU cores clocked as fast as 4.26GHz and six Cortex-A725 balanced CPU cores running at a clock speed of 2.8GHz. There are no efficiency cores which is a configuration that seemed to gain acceptance last year with the launch of MediaTek's Dimensity 9300. The latter brought in over $1 billion in revenue for MediaTek in 2023.

MediaTek is returning to the balls-to-the-wall configuration with the Dimensity 9400 AP which could be powering Oppo's Find X8 in October. This chipset is believed to feature one Cortex-X5 high-performance CPU Core running up to 3.63GHz, three powerful Cortex-X4 CPU cores clocked up to 2.80GHz, and four Cortex-A725 balanced CPU cores running at a clock speed of up to 2.1GHz. Again, there are no efficiency cores although the Cortex-A725 is kind of, sort of being used to handle everyday tasks.

The Oppo Find X8 is believed to be the phone getting tested in a Geekbench test that resulted in a multi-core score of 8833. That score tops the 8492 tallied by the new A18 Pro chip that is powering the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max. Things reverse with the single-core scores which show the  Dimensity 9400 SoC scoring a pedestrian 2889 compared to a 3409 tally for the A18 Pro giving Apple's silicon a 17% edge.

And yes, MediaTek is moving in the right direction since the Dimensity 9400 single and multi-core scores beat the results for the Dimensity 9300 chipset. Also, we need to take into consideration that the Dimensity 9400 application processor has not yet been officially announced. There could be some tweaks made after the announcement that help deliver higher benchmark scores for the SoC. The chipset could be the largest AP ever made for a smartphone and each chip is rumored to be equipped with a whopping 30 billion transistors each. While Apple didn't make an announcement about the number of transistors in the new A18 chipset, each chip should have more than the 19 billion transistors inside each A17 Pro AP.

Besides the Oppo Find X8, we expect the Dimensity 9400 SoC to run the Vivo x200 Pro. Last year the Dimensity 9300 did a great job driving the Vivo x100 Pro which led MediaTek and Vivo to sign a contract for the chip vendor to supply Vivo with the Dimensity 9400 chipset most likely for the Vivo x200 Pro.