While its debut may be months away, the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 Processor for smartphones has been leaked extensively, suggesting that the chip might be one of the most powerful ones ever to exist. It could leave its competitors, such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 and the Apple A18 Pro in the dust. Here’s what we know about it so far.
MediaTek Dimensity 9400: What Has Been Leaked?
The CPU cluster of the Dimensity 9400 has been leaked once before, showing that it will retain a similar architecture as the current flagship chip, the Dimensity 9300, where there’ll be no efficiency cores. This processor will be the first in the Dimensity series to be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process node, specifically the N3E. This will enable improved performance and energy efficiency.
The Dimensity 9400 will definitely need all the support it can get in terms of efficiency considering it won’t consist of dedicated cores to handle it. It’ll be an eight-core setup, including one Cortex-X5 Prime CPU core, three Cortex-X4 Prime CPU cores, and four Cortex-A720 performance CPU cores.
The new chipset’s LPDDR5T RAM support is essential for on-device AI capabilities, potentially exceeding the 33 billion parameter large language model of the MediaTek Dimensity 9300. This will further put MediaTek in line with the competition, especially when there’s news that Apple will be including the same in its upcoming A18 Pro chip for the iPhone 16 series.
Aside from this, Digital Chat Station revealed on Weibo that MediaTek and ARM are collaborating to develop a ‘BlackHawk’ architecture to integrate it into the Dimensity 9400. It could result in a performance boost for the Dimensity chip compared to its competitors. With the Cortex-X5 core using ARM’s new BlackHawk architecture, internal tests look promising, as per DCS.
Additionally, insiders suggest superior Instructions Per Clock (IPC) compared to Apple’s A17 Pro and Qualcomm Nuvia, with a possibility of surpassing the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip.
MediaTek Dimensity 9400 Vs Competition
Such performance gains have allegedly been showing up on Geekbench in terms of numbers as well. The Dimensity 9400 has been outperforming its competitors in leaks, where it allegedly scored 11739 points in the multi-core test. On the other hand, the A18 Pro scored around 8200, followed by 10628 points of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4.
The results show that MediaTek Dimensity 9400 may be one of the most powerful chips of all time. While the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is also slated to get significant improvements over the 8 Gen 3, the A18 Pro is expected to get the least amount of upgrades. It is suggested that the Apple A18 Pro is the same as A17 Pro in most ways along with 10% overall improvement, which makes it more of an incremental upgrade.
MediaTek Dimensity 9400: Launch Timeframe
The announcement for such chips usually take place in Q4 of the year, like how the Dimensity 9300 launched in November 2023. We can expect the Dimensity 9400 to launch in a similar timeframe later this year.