MediaTek’s new flagship chipset is ready for AI and tri-fold phones

MediaTek has formally announced its new flagship mobile chipset, the Dimensity 9400. It has the year-over-year spec bumps we’d expect to see, along with a few future-looking features just to cover all the bases.

The 9400 is built on a 3nm process and is “up to 40 percent more power-efficient” than its predecessor, the 9300. It comprises one Arm Cortex-X925 core running at 3.62GHz, along with three Arm Cortex-X4 and four Cortex-A720 cores, both of which were announced at last year’s Computex. MediaTek says that this combination results in 35 percent faster single-core performance and 28 percent faster multi-core performance compared to the 9300. The chipset also includes Arm’s new 12-core Immortalis-G925 GPU with 40 percent faster ray tracing.

That’s the basic stuff. On the more futuristic side, there’s MediaTek’s own eighth-generation NPU with support for training certain kinds of lightweight AI models on-device, with “80 percent faster large language model prompt performance.” It also supports AI video generation and provides a developer framework for creating agentic applications, which is AI that can actually do things for you. In theory, that’s the next big turn in AI, with everyone from Apple to Rabbit working out how to make it a reality.

In all likelihood, the Dimensity 9400 will be ready long before the most futuristic features it supports; MediaTek says that the 9400 will be available in the market in Q4 of this year. The company’s high-end chips tend to appear in flagship phones from Chinese OEMs like Vivo and Oppo. As such, the 9400 may not make it to the US, where Qualcomm chipsets dominate the popular Android flagships.