Two weeks after Qualcomm unveiled theSnapdragon 8 Gen 3, it’s chipset rival MediaTek’s turn to respond with the similarly-specced Dimensity 9300. Although this is unlikely to make its way into any of the 2024flagship phonesthat reach US shores, it should power some of the biggest and best Chinese Android handsets.
In its efforts to stay one step ahead of Qualcomm on pure performance, MediaTek has opted for a chip architecture that it admits could be controversial: the CPU uses entirely “big” performance cores, with none of the smaller efficiency cores usually reserved for low power tasks.
There’s still a single prime core — a Cortex-X4 clocked at 3.25GHz — which is joined by another trio of X4 cores at a slower 2.85GHz. Those are joined by a quartet of Cortex-A720 processors, all at a relatively slow 2.0GHz.
That’s a major difference compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which packs a single X4 prime core, five A720 cores, and two smaller A520 cores. MediaTek’s design goes big, which should make it a heavy hitter, but will it harm efficiency?
Not according to the company’s own numbers. MediaTek claims its new chip uses 33% less power thanlast year’s 9200at the same performance level, while also offering a whopping 40% improved peak performance. Comparisons to the 8 Gen 3 are less clear-cut for now, but the 9300 can allegedly hit Geekbench 6.0 scores of 7600+, up a little from the 8 Gen 3’s official reference design score of 7501.
The argument from MediaTek is that using bigger cores makes sense even for low intensity tasks, because while they may use more power per second, they get the job done quicker, for a lower power drain overall — and faster performance to boot.
The GPU has been boosted too. The 9300 marks the debut of Arm’s Immortalis-G720 in a 12-core architecture. This is the second Immortalis GPU to feature hardware-driven ray-tracing, now apparently 46% more powerful than its predecessor.
During its launchQualcomm emphasized AI, and MediaTek is keen not to get left behind here either. The company claims AI processing power has doubled year-on-year, and crucially matched Qualcomm’s biggest promise: on-device stable diffusion with images generated in less than a second.
Elsewhere, the Dimensity 9300 supports refresh rates up to 180Hz on WQHD resolution panels, offers a standalone image stabilization module in its camera ISP, and continues support for Wi-Fi 7.
As ever, the challenge for MediaTek isn’t its silicon, which appears once again to be roughly on par with Qualcomm’s, and perhaps edging ahead on pure performance.
The problem is that so far its Dimensity flagships have only appeared in any real numbers in phones for the Chinese market, rarely even making it to the European market — let alone the US.
There’s “Nothing that we can report on right now,” regarding US launches, admitted the company’s VP of corporate marketing, Finbarr Moynihan. He added that “We’re still going to see China, Europe, maybe some of the other markets leading in adoption.”
Don’t hold your breath for a Dimensity 9300 flagship in the US any time soon then — but if you’re elsewhere in the world there might not be such a long wait. MediaTek says the first 9300 devices should launch in November, with speculation rife that the upcoming Vivo X100 series will be the first to use the new chip, keen to rival theSnapdragon-powered Xiaomi 14 series.
