MediaTek Dimensity 9300 - New Design Means Big Benchmark Goals

This week MediaTek announced the newest flagship mobile chip called the Dimensity 9300. Last year, they released the 9200, so I’ll delve into the upgrades and changes, and where you can expect their tech to be integrated.

MediaTek has started taking bolder steps towards making these power efficient chips for smartphones and other mobile devices, and while we don’t hear about them as much here in the states, the company has a huge market share overseas in Europe and Asia. Plus, you likely already have MediaTek technology built into some of your devices like smarthome or VR, and you might not even know it.

The Dimensity 9300 takes a unique approach to the design calling it “All Big Core” architecture, with 4 Ultra large cores and 4 big cores, which, if you follow chipset news, is different from Qualcomm Snapdragon’s traditional design which includes smaller cores. This is MediaTek’s Flagship 5G Generative AI Mobile SoC, so of course, it’s 2023, AI is a big part of the conversation.

So what are the biggest wins with the 9300? Let’s get geeky with the numbers, and an explanation of what these numbers mean, but do make sure to subscribe below if you’re interested in the latest in technical news. It has 22.7 Billion transistors, which is a ridiculous number for a mobile CPU… and it’s 4nm+.

This is the design: It’s for 4 performance cores, 4 efficiency cores, and the memory was upgraded to LPDDR5T at up to 9600 Mbps (megabits per second). So what does that mean in terms of computation efficiency and performance? According to MediaTek, it’s an overall increase in performance over the 9200, and lower power consumption. This is important as more computing takes place locally on devices. For everyday usage, like on social media, or more powerful usage like gaming or video editing, you’ll see better quality performance overall.

It’s the year of AI, and MediaTek brought Generative AI to the on chip APU, with an 8x overall improvement overall. Lots of memory is usually required for this kind of processing, so MediaTek uses this tech called Advanced Hardware Compression to take the required usage from 13GB down to 5GB, freeing up memory for other processes.

Gaming and camera tech isn’t sacrificed though, with this chip bringing 46% better ray tracing on mobile, and increasing the cores from 11 to 12. That means you’ll get console level global illumination effects on mobile, but the power requirements dropped by 40% from the 9200.

The camera capabilities will offer always on HDR in 4K, better effects like depth of field and bokeh for fancy lookin’ videos. Continuous zoom without losing quality is a thing with their dual lossless zoom engine. And the OIS or optical image stabilization is included in the chip - traditionally, this tech is in the sensor hub, so that should improve OIS tech as well.

Connectivity is better, with the WiFi 7 range being extended over last year’s introduction. And they’ve included some cool security tech as well with secure boot and secure computing. As an example, the ARM V9 takes advantage of this tech called Memory Tagging, which can help developers detect memory leaks while programming apps in a developmental environment - leading to more secure apps.

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So, what products will we see this new chip in? It already supports Advanced LLMs or Large Language Models with big tech partners like BaiDu, Meta, and Baichuan AI. At time of recording, device news wasn’t public but we will start seeing product announcements this year, 2023 - so pretty soon given it’s almost the New Year.

The more competition we see in the flagship market the better, as that is a big win for us a consumers and it keeps mobile devices from becoming stagnant.

I’ll be hands on and checking out demos next week so if you have any questions about this new chipset, comment below as I’ve got an opportunity to ask MediaTek directly in person. Bye yall!