MediaTek is unveiling its next chip for flagship phones, which introduces a system for making it easier for phone-makers to integrate more advanced and autonomous artificial intelligence tools.
MediaTek's upcoming chip, the Dimensity 9400, will power premium Android phones set to launch mostly coming in 2025, though a few may debut before the end of the year. In its rivalry with Qualcomm to power high-end phones and devices, MediaTek is doubling down on support for generative AI to ensure manufacturers using its new chip can harness the budding tech easily.
This support comes in the form of the Dimensity Agentic AI Engine, which debuts on the Dimensity 9400 as a framework to standardize applications of so-called agentic AI. These are the supposed next wave of AI models that can learn and plan actions with a degree of autonomy. The AI engine isn't a new AI agent (a la Apple's Siri or Google Gemini), but a tool designed to help device-makers and developers more easily create their own AI agents or other AI-powered applications.
MediaTek has been developing the Dimensity Agentic AI engine for some time, according to Finbarr Moynihan, the company's vice president of corporate marketing. He explained that the phone industry has evolved from using computational AI to enhance photos over the past five years to embracing generative AI last year. Now, the next chapter for device AI is beginning.
"We really feel like we're moving now into this area where we need to make this AI capability more usable for the consumer," Moynihan said. Agentic AI is "basically an on-device AI agent that can take in more complex requests from you, the user, and turn it into actions that can take whatever that might be."
While MediaTek didn't name any specific phones that will use its new chip, Moynihan said to expect phone-makers Oppo and Vivo to announce devices shortly after the chip's reveal this month.
Whether or not that means we could see some of these new agentic AI features in phones before the end of the year is unclear, but possible. The AI-on-phones competition is heating up, as the iPhone 16 series is set to receive its Apple Intelligence upgrade soon and Samsung will likely have its next version of Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S25 series (or whatever they end up being named) expected to come out in early 2025.
Read more: Apple and Samsung Have Different Visions of AI for Our Phones
Regardless, the Dimensity 9400 builds on the generative AI capabilities that first arrived on its predecessor, last year's Dimensity 9300. This year's chip has a new neural processing unit, delivering twice the performance for image-generating Stable Diffusion and up to 80% faster response times when submitting prompts to large language models. The 9400 is also 35% more power efficient at AI tasks and can run multimodal AI at the edge at a rate of over 50 tokens per second, the metric used to denote speed for AI searches.
The other notable improvement is the Dimensity 9400's support for tri-fold displays. Huawei's Mate XT Ultimate Design is currently the only foldable on the market with three displays. CNET senior editor Sareena Dayaram called it astounding, noting that it's a tablet that can "fit into my pocket without being much heavier than a regular foldable phone, though it's understandably chunkier" in her hands-on review.
Rumors suggest the Mate XT Ultimate Design is powered by Huawei's Kirin 9010 chipset.
Other improvements over the Dimensity 9400's predecessor include its move to a 3nm process (smaller than the Dimensity 9300's 4nm). The new chip has 35% faster single-thread performance and 28% better multi-core performance on Geekbench metrics over last year's silicon. Its LPDDR5X memory has 25% better performance and 25% lower power consumption, too.
Gaming also gets a boost, as the Dimensity 9400 is paired with Arm's new 12-core Immortalis G925 GPU (one more core than last year's GPU). This leads to up to 41% faster peak performance, 40% faster ray tracing and 44% power savings.
MediaTek's new chip is also capable of better audio, with support for up to six microphones with 24-bit audio recording. Moynihan noted that AI improvements can focus on eliminating sudden and unwanted noises, which is interesting to see after Apple debuted its subject-selective audio recording modes on its new iPhone 16 Pro models.
The Dimensity 9400 still doesn't support satellite messaging natively on the chip; if desired, phone-makers will have to use a separate MediaTek chip for non-terrestrial network connectivity.
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