On November 6th, chipmaker MediaTek launched the Dimensity 9300, its flagship mobile SoC that aims to challenge the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 announced by Qualcomm two weeks ago.
The Dimensity 9300 uses TSMC’s 3rd-generation 4nm+ technology, is made of 22.7 billion transistors, and features a new “All-Big-Core” CPU architecture dedicated to performance.
MediaTek claims improved performance and power consumption over last-gen Dimensity 9200 and slightly better performance than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in some benchmarks.
All-Big-Core CPU with 8 Cores for extended peak performance
The Dimensity 9300 “all-big core CPU architecture” boasts four Cortex-X4 ultra-large cores, with one clocked at 3.25GHz, three at 2.85GHz, and four big cores Cortex-A720 at 2.0 GHz. The new architecture promises to put MediaTek ahead of the competition with brute performance.
By comparison, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, comes with a single ultra-large Cortex-X4 core, five big Cortex-A720 cores, and two smaller Cortex-A520 efficiency cores to balance energy consumption and performance.
MediaTek promises that the new architecture still delivers good power efficiency and will not face thermal management issues.
“MediaTek made innovative changes with a Big Core CPU architecture, […] that could meet the low power requirements by simply turning on the big cores to compute faster and then going in a low power sleep state much more quickly, […] and at the same time extend the peak performance,” said Finbarr Moynihan, GM and VP, Corporate Marketing, MediaTek.
MediaTek has extended the memory on-chip from a total of 14 MB on the Dimensity 9200 to 18 MB (8 MB L3 cache and 10 MB system cache) on the Dimensity 9300. The external memory interface has been upgraded to support LPDDR5T, the fastest RAM currently available for mobile devices, with a speed of up to 9.6 Gbps.
The Dimensity 9300 delivers 15% more performance than the Dimensity 9200 at the same power level, 33% lower power consumption at the same performance, and 40% higher peak performance, according to MediaTek.
Immortalis-G720, 12-Core GPU With 46% Better Ray Tracing
Last year, the Dimensity 9200 integrated the 11-core Immortalis GPU G-715, the first flagship ARM GPU with hardware-based ray tracing (RT). Thanks to an additional core, combined with more on-chip system RAM and L3 cache with a faster LPDDR5T external memory interface, the new Immortals-G720 delivers a 46% boost in ray tracing performance. Such a gain in RT performance enables global illumination techniques for more realistic 3D gaming.
The company claims a 46% boost in GPU performance over the previous generation at the same power levels, a 40% gain in power efficiency, and significantly higher frame rates than its Qualcomm rival on some of GFX Bench’s gaming benchmarks.
APU 790, 7th Gen AI Processing Unit Designed for Generative AI
The new APU 790 has been re-engineered to support on-device generative AI applications. MediaTek has designed a new A16W4 (INT4) Tensor processing unit and a unique memory compression technology that helps to compute Large Language Models (LLMs) used for generative AI.
Thanks to this new architecture, Mediatek claims that the APU 790 can run LLMs with 7 billion parameters at 20 tokens per second or with 13 billion parameters at a slower rate (with 16 GB RAM), and up to 33 billion with extended RAM.
With its new APU, MediaTek claims an 8x boost in performance over its predecessor for generative AI applications, and the new architecture is touted to process image generation using text-to-image Stable Diffusion models in less than one second.
And like its Qualcomm nemesis, the Dimensity 9300 supports standard large language models (LLMs) such as Meta’s Lama2 and Baidu’s ERNIE-3-4.
On the more traditional AI side, the APU 790 delivers 2x the performance on integer and arithmetic floating point performance for applications such as computational photography and video display management, with a 45% reduction in power consumption compared to last year’s SoC.
Imagiq 990 ISP, Camera Experience Enhancements
The Imagiq 990 ISP offers always-on HDR capability for 4K capture at 60 fps, with real-time bokeh tracking. Thanks to the 16 object layer segmentation support during video recording, the camera system can identify and track faces, persons, body, trees, grass, mountains, sky, sea, and landscapes and then apply different corrections or enhancements to each item.
Other features include standalone OIS and 3-mic HDR audio noise reduction.
The Vivo X100 series smartphones are expected to launch on November 13 in China with the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor.
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