MediaTek has introduced its latest flagship processor, the Dimensity 9400, which promises to boost AI capabilities with a 35% increase in power.

What you need to know

• MediaTek has announced the new Dimensity 9400 SoC, its fourth annual flagship chip built on Arm v9.2 CPU architecture.
• It uses 1x Arm Cortex-X925 (3.62GHz), 3x Cortex-X4 (3.3GHz), and 4x Cortex-A720 (2.4GHz) cores, with 35% and 28% faster single- and multi-core performance.
• The 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU has 41% boosted performance and 44% improved efficiency.
• The new NPU offers 80% faster LLM prompts and 100% diffusion generation performance.

MediaTek has announced the specs for its fourth-gen flagship SoC, the Dimensity 9400. With Qualcomm set to announce its Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 later this month, MediaTek is laying down its own AI-focused challenge now.

While the last-gen Dimensity 9300 topped out at 3.25GHz with its four Cortex-X3 cores, the Dimensity 9400 has one 3.62GHz core and three Cortex-X4s clocked slightly higher at 3.3GHz. The biggest gap is more subtle: MediaTek uses the same Cortex-A720 efficiency chips, but clocked at 2.4GHz instead of 2.0GHz.

The chip uses TSMC N3E processes technology and is up to 40% more power efficient at hitting last year’s top benchmarks. The new Arm Immortalis-G925 is also 44% more power efficient.

Aside from the expected CPU gains, the Dimensity 9400 offers a 100% L2 Cache increase and 50% L3 Cache increase, as well as the new LPDDR5X memory interface for up to 10.7 Gbps. This should all help the Dimensity 9400 perform better in areas like loading times without relying as much on RAM.

MediaTek claims that the CPU hits 3,055 / 9,600 for single- and multi-core benchmark tests in Geekbench 6.2, or 2.8 million for AnTuTu performance.

The most intriguing change comes with a new NPU, which supports its new “Agentic AI engine.” According to MediaTek, it’s the “first mobile chipset to offer on-device LoRA training” (Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models) and “high-quality on-device video generation.” It offers 50 tokens per second and is 80% faster at LLM prompts than the Dimensity 9300.

The Dimensity Agentic AI Engine is a bit confusing for laymen, but essentially it’s a framework to standardize how mobile AI applications work, both on-device and in the cloud; in the latter case, MediaTek plans to create an “Agentic Apps Store” in the cloud where mobile OEMs can access certain AI processes.

“The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 will continue furthering our mission to be the enablers of AI, supporting powerful applications that anticipate users’ needs and adapt to their preferences,” says MediaTek President Joe Chen. “The Dimensity 9400 continues to build on our momentum of steady growth in market share.”

During a MediaTek presentation, VP of Global Marketing Finbarr Moynihan explained that while the company’s primary sales are in China, customers like Xiaomi and Oppo have expanded into Europe, leading to 30% market share and 50% year-over-year growth.

Samsung will use a MediaTek 9300 Plus flagship chip in the Galaxy Tab S10 series for the first time, which felt like a major win for MediaTek over Qualcomm and makes us wonder if we’ll see the Dimensity 9400 in more global devices as well.

Running through the rest of the Dimensity 9400 specs, it has a new 4nm Wi-Fi / Bluetooth chip (as opposed to two separate chips) that’s 50% more power efficient, support for Qi-Fi 7 tri-band MLO, and support for tri-fold smartphones; we’ve seen more multi-fold phone concepts in recent months, and MediaTek wants their business.