MediaTek’s highly anticipated flagship SoC for Android phones has finally arrived, rivaling Qualcomm’s recently unveiled Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip. The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 brings enhanced gaming capabilities as well as generative AI processing on smartphones.
The chipset’s newfound generative AI prowess comes from its enhanced APU 790 AI processor which is not only meant to improve performance but also enable more power efficiency. Compared to the previous generation, the new APU 790 reduces power consumption by 45% and also doubles the integer and floating-point operations performance.
The chip is also capable of generating images in only a second with Stable Diffusion thanks to a new Transformer model for operator acceleration. This upgrades the APU’s AI processing speeds by up to 8 times.
Additionally, the chip can now utilize its memory more efficiently and substantially decrease the memory demands for extensive AI models. This is all thanks to a mixed-precision INT4 quantization technology as well as NeuroPilot memory hardware compression.
The new NeuroPilot Fusion also allows the APU 790 to implement LoRA low-rank adaptation and ensure compatibility with significant language models containing 1 billion, 7 billion, and 13 billion parameters. This architecture also holds the potential for further scalability, accommodating models with up to 33 billion parameters.
The flagship Dimensity 93000 boasts support for mainstream large language models (LLMs) such as Meta Llama 2, Baichuan 2, Baidu AI LLM, and more. This facilitates the rapid and efficient deployment of multi-modal generative AI applications, allowing developers to offer users generative AI experiences encompassing text, images, and music.
Other Upgrades
Other than an advanced APU, the Dimensity 9300 also enables hardware-level ray tracing with its new Immortalis G720 GPU. This tiny graphics card brings a 46% improvement in performance while consuming the same amount of power as its predecessor chip, the Dimensity 9200. That being said, power consumption has also improved by 40% at the same level of performance as the previous chip.
The Taiwanese chipmaker has also updated its CPU core configuration to what it calls the “Big Core Design”. This means that almost its entire CPU cluster is based on performance cores including four Arm Cortex-X4 cores at 3.25GHz and four Cortex-A720 cores operating up to 2.0GHz.
For better connectivity, there is also a new 5G modem, WiFi 7 compatibility, and more.
Smartphones powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 will appear later this year.
