MediaTek has officially launched its Dimensity 9400 chipset, with the overall CPU structure roughly on par with previously leaked information. The 9400 is equipped with one Arm Cortex-X925 core with a peak frequency of 3.62GHz, three Cortex-X4 cores reaching up to 3.3GHz, and four Cortex-A720 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.4GHz.
Compared with the 4GHz CPU frequency of Qualcomm's chip, MediaTek's numbers seem to be lagging. In response, MediaTek has said that it is unclear why its competitors are pushing clock speeds to such high levels since clock speed is not the sole determiner of actual performance. The company is confident that its design can deliver a superior product that also achieves better power balance.
Previously, there were doubts in the market about the CPU design specifications of the Dimensity 9400. This was because compared with the design of the Dimensity 9300, the only difference is that the 9400 swaps out one Cortex-G4 core for the latest Cortex-X925 core. Therefore, the clock speed limit of the older cores has been slightly increased at most.
Still, compared with the Dimensity 9300 released in 2023, the Dimensity 9400's single-core performance has increased by 35% and multi-core performance by 28%. Overall power consumption has been reduced by 40% compared with the previous generation. In addition to upgrading to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) second-generation 3nm process, MediaTek has also fine-tuned its designs.
MediaTek pointed out that this time the CPU architecture uses the latest Armv9.2 architecture extension. Through this upgrade, the CPU can effectively achieve the same powerful performance at a relatively low frequency with a higher operating efficiency.
On the other hand, upgrades in other microarchitectures, such as cache memory, also enable the Dimensity 9400 to more efficiently manage resources. When high-performance demands arise, the ultra-large Cortex-X925 core can operate at full power, while other, less demanding tasks can be handled by the other cores. MediaTek is very confident in the balance of the Dimensity 9400 in this regard.
MediaTek focuses on balance
It is worth noting that during a media Q&A session, MediaTek mentioned that since Qualcomm has yet to officially launch the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and is using its in-house developed Oryon CPU architecture, a comparison between the two is premature. However, it can be noted that MediaTek has adopted the Armv9 instruction set, whereas Qualcomm is still using Armv8.
MediaTek believes that Armv9 is more balanced in terms of power consumption management, and remains conservative about power consumption and operational efficiency, despite watching competitors push processor clock speeds to the limits. MediaTek emphasized that for them, balancing the power consumption and performance of various functions and operations through architectural design is more important than pursuing extreme performance.
Market players pointed out that MediaTek already positioned itself competitively with Qualcomm in 2023 with the All Big Core Design of the Dimensity 9300, proving that it can compete head-on with Qualcomm on flagship mobile SoC design. With its success in 2023, MediaTek is highly confident in the balancing strategy it has adopted in 2024 and says it will not be at a disadvantage when competing with Qualcomm's self-developed Oryon CPU.
Still, Qualcomm's Oryon CPU has already proven itself on the PC platform. Whether the same capabilities can be replicated on the mobile platform, or how using extreme clock speeds will impact the user experience, will be key points of interest in the upcoming competition between these two major Android flagship smartphone SoCs.
