MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 AP will top Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 "in all aspects" says leaker

MediaTek rolled the dice on the Dimensity 9300 application processor (AP) by including no cluster of low-powered Efficiency cores on the chip and loading the chipset with four Prime Cortex-A4 CPU cores and four Cortex-A720 Performance CPU cores. Rumors that the SoC suffered from overheating seemed to come true before the chip was released, although MediaTek issued a strong denial and sent it to us when we published the story.

More recently, a stress test applied to the Dimensity 9300 led to the throttling of the chip by 46% although once again MediaTek defended its design. This time, it called the stress test "flawed." If you thought that MediaTek might return to a more typical configuration of clusters for next year's Dimensity 9400, you might want to think again. 

According to a Weibo post by Digital Chat Station (via Wccftech), the new chip will not have four Cortex-X5 CPU cores but will have eight CPU cores in total. That suggests a configuration made up of three Prime Cortex-X5 cores and five Cortex Performance CPU cores. The post written by the leaker says, "The design architecture of Dimensity 9400 ES is not 4 X5, but it is still a full core lineup, TSMC N3 platform, the design performance is expected to surpass Tongzi (Snapdragon 8 Gen 4) in all aspects..."

A previous rumor notes that once again, MediaTek will not include any low-power efficiency cores inside next year's flagship chipset. Both the Dimensity 9400 and its rival, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, will be manufactured using TSMC's 3nm process node but the MediaTek chip is expected to have a big price gap compared with Qualcomm's AP because the latter will debut the chip designer's new custom Oryon cores replacing Arm's Cortex cores. 

A Qualcomm executive previously mentioned that the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will be more expensive than its predecessor. The larger price gap should help MediaTek drum up some business from Chinese phone manufacturers who might have normally packed their phones with Qualcomm's chipset.

Considering that the Dimensity 9300 SoC was officially announced early last month, we've got a long way to go before the Dimensity 9400 sees the light of day.