MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 SoC could be packed with more than 30 billion transistors

The number of transistors inside a chip gives you an idea of how powerful and/or energy-efficient said chip is. An example I like to use involves Apple's A-series application processor (AP) used to power the iPhone. The A13 Bionic AP that powered the iPhone 11 series was built by TSMC using its 7nm process node and came loaded with 8.5 billion transistors. Last year's 3nm A17 Pro AP, used to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, carries 19 billion transistors. 

We already know that MediaTek's next flagship AP, the Dimensity 9400, is going to be a powerhouse with a configuration that features one Cortex-X5 Prime CPU core, four Cortex-X4 Prime CPU cores, and four Cortex-A720 performance CPU cores. Once again, there are no low-power efficiency cores. Two separate "X" subscribers, @faridofanani96 and @negativeonehero have sent tweets (via Wccftech) giving us some news about the Dimensity 9400 SoC.

According to @faridofanani96, the Dimensity 9400 AP will measure 150mm² making it the largest chipset earmarked for a smartphone when it is introduced later this year. This will allow the SoC to carry a large number of transistors along with a bigger Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI and Machine Learning. Cache sizes will also be larger and the Dimensity 9400 AP could be equipped with more than 30 billion transistors.

The tweet from @negativeonehero shows an image from the Vulkan GPUInfo database supposedly showing that the Dimensity 9400 SoC will feature the Mali-TKRX MC12 GPU. One rumor calls for a 20% performance hike in graphics over the Dimensity 9300 SoC which could be enough for MediaTek's new flagship smartphone chip to top the graphics performance of the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset.

TSMC will be manufacturing the Dimensity 9400 AP using its second-generation 3nm node (N3E) and all things considered, this will probably be the most expensive smartphone chipset ever designed by MediaTek.

Just like last year when there were rumors about the Dimensity 9300 overheating, there has been some talk about the Cortex-X5 Prime CPU core having some temperature issues. One theory is that MediaTek increased the size of the chip's die as a way to deal with this issue.