MediaTek may not be as well-known in the U.S. as the likes of Qualcomm, but the company still builds a range of high-end chips that feature in phones around the world, especially in Europe and Asia. And, it just launched its latest and greatest smartphone chipset that’s set to power the next generation of flagship Android phones — the MediaTek Dimensity 9300.
The Dimensity 9300 is set to go head-to-head against the also-new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 — and while Qualcomm has traditionally built slightly more powerful chips, the Dimensity 9300 could pose a serious challenge to Qualcomm’s dominance.
“The Dimensity 9300 is MediaTek’s most powerful flagship chip yet, bringing a huge boost in raw computing power to flagship smartphones with our groundbreaking All Big Core design,” said Joe Chen, President at MediaTek. “This unique architecture, combined with our upgraded on-chip AI Processing Unit, will usher in a new era of generative AI applications as developers push the limits with edge AI and hybrid AI computing capabilities.”
The new chip is built on the TSMC 4nm process, like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 — but unlike Apple’s new A17 Pro chip, which is built on the 3nm process instead. Unlike those other chipsets, however, the Dimensity 9300 has a completely different core architecture. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 offers one ultra-large core, five big cores, and two small cores, the Dimensity 9300 has four ultra-large cores (Arm Cortex-X4 at up to 3.25GHz) and four big cores (Arm Cortex-A720 at up to 2.0GHz). The result? The chipset may end up offering much better peak performance.
Of course, that’s purely speculative right now, and we have yet to see actual devices with the Dimensity 9300. Not only that, but even if the chipset is more powerful than Qualcomm’s offering, it could pose other challenges, especially around power draw and thermals. Again, we’ll have to wait and see though.
It’s not all about performance though. The 9300 also features the new Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU, which has 12 cores, and MediaTek claims delivers 46% better ray-tracing, and 46% better peak performance compared to the Dimensity 9200.
We’ll have to wait and see how long it takes before devices with the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 actually start launching, however, MediaTek says that the first devices with the chip will launch by the end of 2023, so we won’t have to wait long.
