MediaTek has unveiled its ultra-powerful Dimensity 9300 processor for high-end Android smartphones. It will compete with Samsung's Exynos 2400, which was announced a few weeks ago, and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which went official a few days ago. The Dimensity 9300 is a peculiar chipset, though, featuring only high-performance CPU cores.
The Dimensity 9300 has 15% faster CPU performance in single-core workloads, 40% faster performance in multi-core tasks, and 46% faster graphics performance.
MediaTek Dimensity 9300 specifications: Only high-performance CPU cores
The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is the company's most powerful smartphone processor yet, fabricated using TSMC's third-generation 4nm process. Unlike all other smartphone chips, the Dimensity 9300 uses an ‘All Big Core' design, with four Cortex-X4 CPU cores (up to 3.2GHz) and four Cortex-A720 CPU cores clocked at 2GHz. However, the four Cortex-X4 CPU cores are divided into two clusters: one Cortex-X4 CPU core clocked at 3.25GHz and three Cortex-X4 CPU cores clocked at 2.85GHz. It has an 8MB L3 cache and a 10MB system-level cache.
The chipset also features the Arm Immortalis-G720 MC12 GPU that can drive a WQHD+ display at 180Hz or a 4K resolution screen at up to 120Hz. The GPU supports hardware-accelerated raytracing with global illumination effects. The chipset is compatible with LPDDR5T 9600Mbps DRAM and UFS 4.0 storage. It also features MediaTek APU 790, which offers on-device Generative AI features with added support for INT4 and hardware compression.
The Imagiq 990 ISP (Image Signal Processor) inside the Dimensity 9300 supports up to 320MP camera sensors. It can capture 8K 30fps or up to 4K 120fps video recording. It also supports Android 14's Ultra HDR feature that captures images and videos in HDR and displays them in HDR format on supported screens. The ISP also lets phones record 4K 30fps videos with background blur effects (portrait mode).
In terms of connectivity, the Dimensity 9300 has a fully integrated 5G modem that supports both mmWave and sub-6GHz (SA and NSA) 5G networks. It also features 5G+4G dual-SIM dual-active capability in addition to 4G CA (Carried Aggregation) and 5G CA (Carried Aggregation). It has Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, and USB 3.2 Type-C port. MediaTek also claims that it has improved Wi-Fi hotspot functionality by up to 3x compared to rival solutions.
Phones featuring this chip will also feature triple-frequency GPS (L1CA+L5+ L1C), BeiDou (B1I+ B1C + B2a +B2b), and Galileo (E1 + E5a +E5b). Other positioning features include dual-frequency QZSS (L1CA+ L5) and single-frequency NavIC (L5).
This story continues after our Galaxy S23 Ultra review video below.
Vivo X100 Pro will be the first phone to feature Dimensity 9300 chipset
The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 chipset will be used in the Vivo X100 Pro, which will be launched on November 14, 2023. It will be Vivo's flagship smartphone for 2024.
MediaTek President Joe Chen said, “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.“