MediaTek announces Dimensity 9300, high-end SoC without economical cores

MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9300, a SoC that uses powerful Arm cores, but does not have light, economical cores. Yet the company claims that the new SoC is up to 33 percent more energy efficient than its predecessor, the 9200.

The Dimensity 9300 used two types of Arm Cortex cores, X4 cores and A720 cores. There are four cores of both core types in the SoC and one X4 core is clocked higher, reports Android Police. This makes the Dimensity 9300 the first SoC that consists of different types of cores and does not have light, economical cores. MediaTek claims that these more efficient cores are not necessary, because the A720 cores complete simple tasks faster than more efficient cores, meaning less net energy is used. The SoC is also faster.

MediaTek claims that the SoC is up to 33 percent more efficient compared to the 9200, at a comparable performance level. In addition, the peak power of the SoC is 40 percent higher than with the 9200. The Immortalis G720 GPU is also said to be more economical than the GPU in the 9200 series; MediaTek says up to 40 percent more efficient at the same performance level and up to 46 percent more powerful for the same energy consumption. The SoC has a ‘second-generation ray tracing engine’.

In addition to the faster CPU and GPU, the Dimensity 9300 has a 790 APU for AI tasks. MediaTekt talks about doubling the integer and floating point operator performance and a 45 percent reduction in energy use. The apu supports local running of language models such as Meta’s Llama 2, Baichuan 2 and Baidu AI, with up to 33 billion parameters.

The SoC should appear in phones for the first time at the end of this year. MediaTek does not say which phones this will be in. The Dimensity 9300 must compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor.