MediaTeks New Chip Just Raised The Bar For Android Phones
MediaTek is all set to enter the Android flagship phone race and challenge Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 with its latest processor . The Taiwanese company's latest weapon is the MediaTek Dimensity 9300, which is based on a 4-nanometer process and features a high-end ARM quad-core chipset, giving it an edge in terms of raw performance.
Compared to its direct competitor Qualcomm (which has only one large core), the MediaTek chip has a more ambitious core configuration. There are four ARM Cortex-X4 cores, one clocked at 3.25GHz and the other three clocked at 2.85GHz, and for less demanding tasks there is a set of Arm Cortex-A710 cores.
Claiming nearly double the performance in the MediaTek Geekbench 6 test and an impressive total of over 213,000 in AnTuTu, this gorgeous flagship shows its prowess in synthetic benchmarks. In gaming-focused tests like GFXBench, the company says it has a bigger advantage.
The Dimensity 9300 can support displays up to a maximum refresh rate of 180 Hz, while 4K panels can refresh up to 120 Hz. As for connectivity, Wi-Fi 7 is part of the package. There is also a special security chip to boot the operating system safely.
On the AI innovation front, MediaTek's latest flagship mobile processor features an AI engine that doubles AI performance in some metrics while consuming 45% less power. Dubbed the APU 790, MediaTek says it's eight times faster than its predecessor and can produce visual media in less than a second using stable diffusion patterns to convert text to images.
The company has also changed the memory architecture and says it can handle large language models with 13 billion parameters "up to 33 billion". By comparison, Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can only run AI models with a maximum of 10 billion parameters.
Like its Qualcomm counterpart, MediaTek's offerings support major media language models such as Meta's Llama 2 and Baidu's LLM, among others. But once again the goal is clear. MediaTek follows Qualcomm in the race for generative AI ventures spanning text, visual media and audio generations. When another chipmaker jumps in on AI, it could be more bad news for Google's Pixel phones.
On the graphics front, the Dimensity 9300 relies on the new 12-core Immortalis-G720 GPU, which is said to be 46% faster and 40% more energy efficient. MediaTek also relies on gaming-focused features such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing, which delivers a 60 frames per second (fps) gaming experience with console-quality lighting effects.
The image signal processor allows you to shoot 4K HDR at 60 frames per second and watch bokeh in real time in 4K video. There's nothing as advanced as AI-powered object removal like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but the Dimensity 9300 offers native features like AI-powered object detection, dynamic video quality adjustment, and pixel-level autofocus.
MediaTek says the first Dimensity 9300-powered phones will arrive later this year. This time around, MediaTek seems to have overtaken Qualcomm in terms of raw firepower as well as willingness to embrace the AI techniques that are in vogue these days. It will be interesting to see how many brands will choose MediaTek over Qualcomm in 2024 and if they can finally close the gap in terms of customer preferences.
