MediaTek Dimensity 9300 could have the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 shaking in its boots

Hot off the heels of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 announcement, MediaTek has announced its flagship smartphone SoC for 2024, the Dimensity 9300. There’s nothing unusual about that, but what’s more surprising, is the performance claims.

MediaTek is using a brand-new architecture for the Dimensity 9300, which it calls an “All Big Core” design. This consists of four Cortex X4s at 3.24GHz and four Cortex A720s at 2.00GHz. It’s built on TSMC 4nm silicon and packs a whopping 22.7 billion transistors. For those of us who aren’t silicon nerds, that effectively equates to a 15 per cent increase in single-core performance and a 40 per cent increase in multi-core performance.

MediaTek is claiming scores of 2,130,000+ in the AnTuTu benchmark in real-world conditions. To put that in perspective, leaked benchmarks of the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered OnePlus 12 are showing scores of 2,110,808. So there’s a very real possibility that MediaTek could be the brand to beat in 2024.

It’s a similar story in GeekBench 6, where MediaTek claims to have achieved scores of 7600+ in normal conditions, compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s 7501, which was achieved in a lab setting.

Of course, these benchmarks come directly from the manufacturer, so they should be taken with a pinch of salt. But the prospect of MediaTek being more competitive at the high end is very exciting, nonetheless.

When it comes to gaming, the Dimensity 9300 relies on the Arm Immortalis G720 GPU, which has a 12-core architecture, up from 11 cores on the previous generation. This should mean 46 per cent better peak performance and ray tracing, along with 40 per cent lower power consumption at the same performance level, when compared to the Dimensity 9200.

Dimensity boosts AI performance

It’s 2023, so it wouldn’t be a flagship chip launch if there wasn’t a mention of on-device generative AI, and the Dimensity 9300 has impressive chops in that area, too. It has a dedicated chip, the APU 790 generative AI engine, which doubles the integer arithmetic and floating point operations while reducing power consumption by 45 per cent.

So what does that mean? Well, apparently, it’ll beat the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (note that’s 2, not 3) in the ETHZ v.5.1 benchmark by a cool 48 per cent, and it can also run Stable Diffusion on-device in less than 1 second. However, now that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has been announced, we know that hardware will also run Stable Diffusion on device, generating images in under 1 second.

The problem is, at present, no one is really doing anything else with generative AI on their devices, it’s all done in the cloud – even Google’s widely-lauded Magic Editor. Though, at the rate chip manufacturers are implementing AI features on their hardware, it’s only a matter of time before developers start to take advantage of the capabilities. On that front, MediaTek says it has been working closely with Baidu, Meta and Baichuan AI to support their LLMs, and it says there’s more to come, too.

Elsewhere, plenty of work has been put into the Dimensity 9300’s image signal processor. It can support always-on HDR video at 4K with simulated bokeh effects, and it can also track up to 16 objects at once to ensure the best processing and exposure for your shots. There’s also support for 100 per cent pixel-level autofocus and dual lossless zoom.

Phones powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 will be announced imminently, and some models will be available to purchase before the end of the year. As usual, we’re expecting these to land in China first, but we’ll almost certainly see some Dimensity 9300 phones in Europe in early 2024. Whether any will make their way to the States, however, is much less of a certainty.