Next year's flagship Android phones will have ultra-high performance chipsets, two of which have already been unveiled. Qualcomm took the lead by announcing the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in October this year. It was shortly followed up by MediaTek with its Dimensity 9300. Samsung's Exynos 2400 is also in the running.
MediaTek took an aggressive approach with its high-end chipset. It opted to equip the Dimensity 9300 with only high-performance CPU cores. Many felt that this could result in extreme throttling under high loads. It's no surprise that this is precisely what a benchmark result has now shown.
Dimensity 9300 throttles to 46% of max performance
The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 has four Cortex-X4 CPU cores clocked at up to 3.2GHz and four Cortex-A720 CPU cores at 2GHz. The concern that many expressed when this chipset emerged was that it could thermal throttle due to the higher power consumption. A benchmark result shows that the Dimensity 9300 throttles quite aggressively, to the point where its max performance reduces by over 50%.
The test was conducted on the Vivo X100 Pro, the first flagship phone to feature this MediaTek chipset. Within two minutes of the benchmark being run, the Dimensity 9300 throttles to just 46% of its maximum performance. One of the cores throttled down to just 0.6GHz core clock compared to the max frequency of 3.25GHz.
This is particularly bad when you consider the fact that the Vivo X100 Pro has a vapor chamber cooling system which should provide enhanced temperature regulation for this core component. It goes to show that the throttling could be even more extreme in devices with less advanced cooling solutions.
It's pertinent to note there that benchmark tests are meant to push the CPU to the extreme limits, and these levels are rarely achieved during normal use, so while the real world impact will be limited, users will experience a significant drop in performance if they push their devices to the max.
