MediaTek’s next chip will allow Android phone makers to use more advanced AI
MediaTek unveils its next chip for flagship phones, introducing a system that makes 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 that will largely hit the market in 2025, although 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 the new chip can easily leverage the nascent technology.
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 some degree of autonomy. The AI Engine is not a new AI agent (like Apple’s Siri or Google Gemini), but a tool designed to help device manufacturers 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 over the past five years from using computational AI to enhance photos to embracing generative AI last year. Now the next chapter for device AI begins.
“We really feel like we’re moving into this area now where we need to make these AI capabilities more useful to consumers,” Moynihan said. Agentic AI is “basically an on-device AI agent that can take more complex requests from you, the user, and turn them into actionable actions.”
While MediaTek hasn’t named any specific phones that will use the new chip, Moynihan expects phone makers Oppo and Vivo to announce devices shortly after the chip’s unveiling this month.
Whether this means we could see some of these new AI features in phones before the end of the year is unclear, but possible. Competition in AI on phones is heating up, as the iPhone 16 series will soon receive its Apple Intelligence upgrade and Samsung will likely have its next version of Galaxy AI on the Galaxy S25 series (or whatever they end up being called ) is expected to be released in early 2025.
Read more: Apple and Samsung have different visions of AI for our phones
Either way, the Dimensity 9400 builds on the generative AI capabilities that first arrived on its predecessor, last year’s Dimensity 9300. This year’s chip features a new neural processing unit, delivering twice the performance for image-generating stable diffusion and up to 80% faster response times when sending cues to large language models. The 9400 is also 35% more power efficient on AI tasks and can perform multimodal AI at the edge at a rate of more than 50 tokens per second, the metric used to indicate speed for AI queries.
The other notable improvement is the Dimensity 9400’s support for trifold displays. Huawei’s Mate XT Ultimate Design is currently the only foldable on the market with three displays. CNET editor-in-chief Sareena Dayaram called it amazing, noting that it’s a tablet that “fits in my pocket without being much heavier than a regular foldable phone, although it is understandably larger” in her hands-on review.
Rumors suggest that the Mate XT Ultimate Design will be powered by Huawei’s Kirin 9010 chipset.
Other improvements over the Dimensity 9400’s predecessor include the 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 according to Geekbench metrics over last year’s silicon. The LPDDR5X memory delivers 25% better performance and also 25% lower power consumption.
Gaming also gets a boost, as the Dimensity 9400 is paired with Arm’s new 12-core Immortalis G925 GPU (one core more than last year’s GPU). This results in up to 41% faster peak performance, 40% faster ray tracing and 44% energy 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 could focus on eliminating sudden and unwanted sounds, 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 does not support native on-chip satellite messaging; if desired, phone manufacturers will have to use a separate MediaTek chip for non-terrestrial network connectivity.
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