MediaTek beats Qualcomm to the punch with Android's first 3nm flagship phone chip

09 Oct 2024, 03:30 by Dominic Preston · Android Police

Key Takeaways

MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 beats Qualcomm to market with a 3nm chip that boasts a 40% power efficiency boost over the previous generation.
The new SoC features an "All Big Core" design with eight power-hungry cores for strong peak performance, leaning on the 3nm process to bridge any power efficiency gaps.
The Dimensity 9400 has demonstrated impressive graphics performance in benchmarks, and on paper supports WQHD+ resolutions at 180Hz refresh rates, something that could prove useful for tri-fold displays.

Android’s other chipset competitor has beaten Qualcomm to the punch in unveiling its flagship chip for 2024, and the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 is also the first from either company to hit 3nm.

The 9400 will be mass manufactured on TSMC’s second-generation 3nm process, N3E, to which MediaTek attributes a whopping 40% improvement in power efficiency when compared to last year’s 4nm Dimensity 9300.

This isn’t the first 3nm chip to hit smartphones though. We hate to admit it, but Apple got there first with its 3nm A17 Pro a full 12 months ago, and its recent A18 chips are built on the same N3E node as MediaTek’s. Rumor has it that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 has been built to the same standard though, and when that’s unveiled later this month we’ll know for sure.

MediaTek at least had fun sending out its new "3nm flavor" of chip

Measurements aside, MediaTek and Qualcomm’s chips are likely to be quite different however. MediaTek has doubled down on the “All Big Core” design it introduced last year, delivering a chip with eight power-hungry “big” cores rather than using any of the lower clock speed cores other designs introduce in the name of efficiency during low load.

There’s big and there’s big, however. The 9400 still has one prime core — a Cortex-X925 running at 3.62GHz — backed up by a trio of Cortex-X4 cores and four Cortex-A720 cores. It still insists that this design delivers the combination of strong peak performance and power efficiency, with its big-ish cores able to complete low intensity tasks quicker — and thus more efficiently — than smaller, slower options.

How is that peak performance? Well, here at Android Police we don’t place too much stock on artificial benchmarks — it’s not part of how we review phones — but they can be a rough guide. MediaTek says the Dimensity 9400 has hit scores of 3,055 on Geekbench 6.2’s single-core test, and 9,600 on its multi-core version. Those are 35% and 28% jumps up from the 9300 — a sizeable leap — and way up on the 2,140 and 6,688 figures that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 managed to hit in this year’s S24 Ultra.

Graphics should be punchy too, with Arm’s latest 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU onboard, itself driving a further 40% performance boost by MediaTek’s numbers. Meanwhile a new NPU drives AI features, with doubled performance for diffusion model generation.

Two other fun specs come for displays: the 9400 supports WQHD+ resolutions at a blistering 180Hz refresh rate, which MediaTek says was a request from OEMs — so expect to see phones that actually hit those speeds before too long. It also supports tri-fold displays like the recent Huawei Mate XT, so hopefully more of those are on the cards too.

The world's first tri-fold phone feels shockingly sturdy

The Mate XT feels third-gen, not first

Will the Dimensity 9400 actually land in any US phones?

The big question here is, as ever for MediaTek, support. The Dimensity 9300 is a great chip, but right now you can’t find it in any phones for sale in the US, with support limited to Chinese models like the Vivo X100 Pro.

The last few weeks marked a sea change though, as Samsung shocked some by adopting the Dimensity chip in its recent Galaxy Tab S10+ and Tab S10 Ultra — the first time the Korean company has used MediaTek silicon in any of its flagship products. That naturally raises speculation about what chip we might see in next spring’s Galaxy S25 series, and all of a sudden the Dimensity 9400 making an appearance isn’t totally out of the question.

Samsung's Galaxy Tab S10 series arrives without the Tab S10

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So far only Oppo has officially confirmed plans to use the 9400, which it says will launch internationally — read: Europe — in the upcoming Find X8 series before the end of the year.