Dimensity 9400 arriving in Q4 with one Cortex-X5 and three X4 cores

The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 was launched in November last year and had a strange design: it packed four Prime Cortex-X4 cores, instead of the usual one. And it skipped small cores altogether, using four Cortex-A720s to bring the core count to eight.

MediaTek CEO Cai Lixing attended the grand opening of a new office building and spoke highly of the success of the 9300, adding that artificial intelligence will become increasingly important for smartphones.

The CEO also teased the next flagship chip, tentatively dubbed “Dimensity 9400,” expected in the fourth quarter of this year. This will be the first MediaTek built on TSMC’s 3nm node (N3E), the 9300 was built on the older N4P node.

Now, the CPU configuration of the Dimensity 9400 hasn’t been officially confirmed, but here’s what the early rumors say. The highest clocked core will be a new Cortex-X5 (which has yet to be officially announced). The middle and bottom cores remain the same: 3x Cortex-X4 and 4x Cortex-A720.

Dimensity 9400 arriving in Q4, likely to feature one Cortex-X5 core and three X4s

We don’t know the clock speed yet and we haven’t seen the N3E node in action (it should be used for the iPhone 16 series). In our tests, the 9300 showed excellent stability under load, maintaining 80 percent of its peak power after 40 minutes and stabilizing at 73 percent after extended use.

This was impressive to see, considering the point of having just one main core and several small ones was to reduce power consumption and heat. MediaTek has shown that focusing on large cores is also a viable strategy.

Anyway, as you can see in the graph, Dimensity 9400 is also expected to have a better NPU with 20%-50% faster generation from large language models like Llama2 7B and 15% faster image generation with Stable Diffusion v1.5.

PS. reports claim that MediaTek has teamed up with Nvidia to build a chipset with a GeForce GPU instead of the usual ARM Mali/Immortalis. This will make for an interesting fight against the Exynos 2500, which will reportedly only feature a Cortex-X5 (with Cortex-A730 and A520 making up the rest of the CPU) and an AMD-based GPU.