Could the Dimensity 9400, not the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, be the chipset to beat later this year?
MediaTek rolled the dice with the Dimensity 9300 application processor and it paid off for the company. What MediaTek did was remove the low-power Efficiency CPU cores (which probably would have been the Cortex-A520) and instead configured the chip to include four Cortex-X4 Prime CPU cores running up to 3.25GHz along with four Cortex-A720 Performance CPU cores as fast as 2GHz.
Besides being powerful, your second thought probably would be concern about the thermals of the AP. Before the chip was released, leaker Evan Blass shared details about the chipset overheating when the CPU cores were running at their expected clock rate. But the Dimensity 9300 has been powering the Vivo X100 series, and the same SoC will be under the hood of the Vivo Pad 3 tablet.
So what will MediaTek do for an encore? We've already heard some rumors about the Dimensity 9400 and now leaker Digital Chat Station (via Wccftech) has the latest information on this component. Like the Dimensity 9300, the Dimensity 9400 will skip the low-power Efficiency cores and use a combination of Cortex-X5, Cortex-X4 and Cortex-A7xx Performance CPU cores. One possibility thrown out by Wccftech would include a configuration made up of one Cortex-X5 core, three Cortex-X4 cores, and four Cortex-A7xx cores.
Leaker Digital Chat Station reveals more information about the Dimensity 9400
Assuming that when we talk about the Dimensity 9400 as being a hot chip, we are discussing demand for the SoC, MediaTek is going to have a winner on its hands. The Dimensity 9300 has reportedly generated $1 billion in revenue for the company, and reports say that Vivo has already signed up to take delivery of the new AP which China Times says runs 20% "better," whatever that means, than the Dimensity 9300 SoC.
The main rival for the Dimensity 9400 chipset is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 SoC. Qualcomm is said to be pricing the new flagship Snapdragon chipset in the stratosphere which could give MediaTek a hook to hang Dimensity 9400 AP sales on.
Digital Chat Station says that first, MediaTek is tentatively scheduled to release the Dimensity 9300+ SoC in May with the Cortex-X4 running at 3.4GHz. The leaker says that this chipset will feature Arm's Immortalis-G720 MC12 GPU. The Dimensity 9400 is tentatively scheduled for an October debut and is being built by TSMC using its 3nm process node.
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