MediaTek Dimensity 9400 3nm SoC specs hint at huge AI gains

MediaTek is gearing up to drop its fresh Dimensity 9400 chipset in the last quarter of this year, as per info from Chinese media. Come January 30th, MediaTek had a little celebration for the Zhubei office building, giving it the title of Taiwan’s new tech landmark. The bigwig, Chairman Tsai Ming-chie, is looking ahead to its full completion in 2027, making it a major deal for MediaTek.

Cai Lixing, the CEO, gave a shoutout to the winning streak of the Dimensity 9300 chip and showed strong belief in the growing popularity of AI-powered mobile phones. The soon-to-drop Dimensity 9400, hitting the market this year, is stepping up its game by using TSMC’s 3nm process, taking things a notch higher in the AI features department compared to the 9300.

The next-gen SoC in the Dimensity lineup is making history as the initial one crafted using TSMC’s 3nm process node, the N3E to be exact. Get ready for better performance and energy efficiency coming your way. So, the Dimensity 9400 is gearing up to rock a setup with one main gun, the Cortex-X5 Prime CPU core, along with a squad of four Cortex-X4 Prime CPU cores and another four Cortex-A720 performance CPU cores.

Even though MediaTek didn’t outright call it the Dimensity 9400, the specs line up with what Chairman Tsai spilled. This fresh chip is rolling out with support for LPDDR5T RAM, a must for rocking on-device AI powers. Who knows, it might just outdo the 33 billion parameter large language model of its Dimensity 9300 sibling.

Watch out for a face-off with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, which is also jumping on the TSMC’s second-gen 3nm node bandwagon. If we peek at the estimated performance figures, the Dimensity 9400 seems to be handling 12 to 15 tokens per second with the 7-billion parameter Llama 2 model. Plus, word on the street is, it’s cranking out images faster than its Dimensity 9300 cousin.

MediaTek and TSMC’s tag team on the 3nm chip is moving ahead, and they’ve got plans for mass production later this year. The inside scoop on the Dimensity 9400’s performance is set to drop in an official announcement around Q4 2024.