• MediaTek has announced its new Dimensity 9300 chipset designed for use in the latest flagship smartphones.
• The Dimensity 9300 features a 4nm+ architecture, as well as a reported 46 percent increase in GPU performance compared to its predecessor.
• It is also focusing on AI-related tasks, delivering eight times the processing speed thanks to a new component.

Taiwanese silicon foundry MediaTek is ready to throw down the mobile gauntlet after unveiling its new Dimensity 9300 processor designed with the latest flagship smartphones in mind.

The debut of the Dimensity 9300 comes two weeks after Qualcomm revealed its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 to the world, which also happened to be powering the new Xiaomi 14 series.

Like much of the new mobile silicon that has been unveiled in recent months, the MediaTek offering is boasting vast improvements over its predecessor. The octa-core Dimensity 9300 is built on a 4nm+ bed which the company is billing as “all big-core architecture,” which is to say it features four ultra large cores and four big cores.

“The Dimensity 9300 is MediaTek’s most powerful flagship chip yet, bringing a huge boost in raw computing power to flagship smartphones with our groundbreaking All Big Core design. This unique architecture, combined with our upgraded on-chip AI Processing Unit, will usher in a new era of generative AI applications as developers push the limits with edge AI and hybrid AI computing capabilities,” highlighted Joe Chen, president at MediaTek, of the new chipset.

Two key elements in the design of the new chip lie in its GPU and AI processor. The latter is in-house, with MediaTek’s, “next generation APU 790 AI processor is integrated into the Dimensity 9300 and designed to significantly improve generative AI performance and energy efficiency for faster and more secure edge computing. The APU 790 doubles the integer and floating-point operations performance, while reducing power consumption by 45%.”

“By adapting the Transformer model for operator acceleration, the processing speed of the APU 790 is 8 times faster than the previous generation, with image generation within one second using Stable Diffusion,” it adds.

As for the GPU aspect, Arm assisted on that front by serving up its Immortalis-G720 unit. Here it is said to deliver a, “46% boost in GPU performance while at the same level of power consumption as the Dimensity 9200. Similarly impressive, the Dimensity 9300 provides a 40% reduction in GPU power consumption at the same level of performance as the previous generation chipset.”

We are yet to see the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or Dimensity 9300 in action on an actual smartphone, but MediaTek is already claiming comparable performance, noting that its new silicon mustered a score of 2 130 000+ on AnTuTu, which is roughly the same as Qualcomm’s score, per Engadget.

It’s unclear when the Dimensity 9300 will hit the market on a flagship phone, but the company says a handful of phone models will sport it before the end of 2023, with Vivo being touted as one of the first.