MediaTek Dimensity 9400 features 3.62 GHz Cortex-X925 prime core, Immortalis-G925 GPU, 35% higher single-core, 41% faster graphics, and up to 44% power savings
MediaTek has unveiled its latest flagship SoC, the Dimensity 9400 today. The Dimensity 9400 is based on the new Armv9.2 instruction set and once again features an all big octa-core design fabbed on TSMC's second gen 3 nm process.
Prime core gets a Cortex-X925 upgrade
With the Dimensity 9400, MediaTek has upgraded the prime core to the Cortex-X925 codename "Black Hawk". ARM claims that the Cortex-X925 has the biggest single-threaded IPC uplift and can be configured with clocks reaching 3.8 GHz and up to 3 MB of L2 cache. The Dimensity 9400's Cortex-X925 implementation uses a 3.63 GHz core with 2 MB L2 cache.
Next up are 3x Cortex-X4 cores with 1 MB L2 cache similar to the Dimensity 9300+. MediaTek doesn't specify the clocks, though. Finally, we have 4x Cortex-A720 cores with 512 KB of L2 cache. Interestingly, MediaTek has chosen to go with Cortex-A720 cores instead of the significantly more power-efficient Cortex-A725 that ARM introduced this year.
The rationale behind this decision isn't exactly clear, however. One would think that Cortex-A725 would have been a more prudent choice, considering that the other two clusters are already quite powerful. Also, the Cortex-A725 features 1 MB of L2 cache, compared to the 512 KB maximum with the Cortex-A720.
It is possible that MediaTek is trying to maximize yields by reusing the older Cortex-A720 cores, which are essentially just refreshed A715s for 3 nm. Whether a potential "Dimensity 9400+" would shift to Cortex-A725 in the future remains to be seen.
MediaTek has also endowed the Dimensity 9400's CPU cluster with 12 MB of L3 cache and 10 MB of SLC. Although the company claims this is 50% more L3 cache than the "previous generation Dimensity flagship", the Dimensity 9300 and Dimensity 9300+ already sport 18 MB L3 caches.
Faster memory is supported as well, with up to LPDDR5X-10667 and UFS 4 + MCQ.
41% faster Immortalis-G925 MC12 GPU with opacity micromaps
The Dimensity 9400 features ARM's latest Immortalis-G925 MC12 GPU, which promises to be a significant upgrade over the Immortalis-G720 MC12 in the previous generation. MediaTek claims up to 41% faster peak performance and 40% faster ray tracing, all while being 44% more power-efficient.
The Immortalis-G720 GPU also brings support for opacity micromaps (OMMs) similar to what we've seen with Nvidia's Ada Lovelace and previous RTX cards. Opacity micromaps are a way to reduce ray tracing workload by identifying alpha-tested meshes or triangles that are fully opaque or transparent. Shader calculations for these regions can be skipped, which improves ray tracing performance, as alpha evaluation is a costly process.
To take advantage of OMMs, Android devices need SoCs supporting the Vulkan VK_EXT_opacity_micromap extension, and the Dimensity 9400 is the first of those.
MediaTek has also worked with ARM to develop HyperEngine Super Resolution upscaling support for the Immortalis-G925.
8th gen MediaTek NPU 890 with Agentic AI
With the NPU 890, MediaTek claims a 100% faster diffusion generation and 80% faster LLM prompt performance, while being 35% more efficient compared to the previous generation.
MediaTek says that the Dimensity 9400 is made for Agentic AI or AI agents that will enable developers to offer capabilities such as on-device AI generation, diffusion transformers, and mixture of experts (MoE). The NPU 890 builds on LoRA Fusion support offered previously by allowing on-device LoRA training for the first time.
Other Dimensity 9400 features include:
- Support for tri-foldable displays
- MiraVision 1090 with OLED de-burn in compensation
- Imagiq 1090 with full-range HDR zoom and sustained autofocus
- Generative AI zoom up to 100x
- 24-bit 384 KHz Bluetooth audio
- 24-bit 6-mic recording with AI audio focus
- 3GPP Release-17 5G modem with 4CC-CA 7 Gbps sub-6 GHz performance
- New 4 nm Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip with faster Wi-Fi 7 with up to 7.3 Gbps transfer rates
Based on what we know so far, the Oppo Find X8 series, Vivo X200 series, and the iQOO Neo 10 Pro are some of the upcoming devices powered by the Dimensity 9400 SoC, with the Find X8 and Vivo X200 lineups slated to for an offiical launch this month in China.
Buy the Lenovo Tab M11 with MediaTek Helio G88 SoC on Amazon
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