MediaTek officially unveiled the Dimensity 9400 as its most powerful chip that will power upcoming flagship Android smartphones. It boasts impressive performance upgrades and new features. But MediaTek is always compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series, but which one is better? Can the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 beat the Dimensity 9400?
Before we get started, it is worth noting that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is expected to launch with the Snapdragon 8 Elite moniker.
1. Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 vs Dimensity 9400: Specifications
Talking about the newly announced chipset first, the Dimensity 9400 features MediaTek’s 2nd Gen All Big Core design. This integrates the powerful ARM Cortex-X925 core, which runs at over 3.62GHz and combines three Cortex X4 cores and four Cortex A720 cores. The company claims that this chip offers 35% faster single-core and 28% faster multi-core performance compared to the Dimensity 9300.
It is built on TSMC’s 2nd Gen 3nm process, making it up to 40% more power efficient to improve battery life. It has a new NPU for improved AI functionality and 12-core ARM Immortalis-G925 GPU for 40% faster ray tracing performance. So there’s a bump in performance and energy efficiency.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (or the Snapdragon 8 Elite) has yet to be released. Although, rumors and reports have revealed a lot of its key specifications. It is also manufactured on TSMC’s 3nmm process with a 6 core CPU (2 x 4.05GHz + 4 x 2.2GHz), a 6 core GPU, and a 16 core Neural Engine that is capable of 35 trillion operations per second. There are also rumors of a 4.37GHz variant, which could be dubbed as Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 for Galaxy.
This is paired with a 6 core Adreno 830 graphics unit that has a 1.45GHz clock frequency and improved hardware ray tracing. The GPU alone is expected to offer 56% faster performance compared to its predecessor, the Adreno 750. From these specs alone, it is hard to compare these two high end processors, so let’s have a look at their benchmark performance.
2. Benchmarks
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 4/8 Elite was previously spotted on GeekBench. It achieved a score of 2884 points in the single core test and 8840 points in the multi core test. It is worth noting that the score was for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, but this variant was running at a 4.09GHz clock speed and not 4.37GHz. On AnTuTu, this processor was previously seen achieving a score of over 1.7 million. Certain benchmarking based websites have even listed the chip with a score of over 3 million.
On the other hand, the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 achieved 2818 points in the single core test of GeekBench, while its multi core scores reached 8847 points. Just recently, the Dimensity 9400 managed to breach the 3 million mark on AnTuTu, showcasing impressive performance. We covered this in our recent report where we compared Apple’s A18 Pro and Dimensity 9400.
3. So which one is faster?
Unfortunately, since Qualcomm hasn’t announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, it is hard to do a proper comparison at the moment. But these leaks and rumors have shown that MediaTek isn’t an afterthought in the top end segment anymore and directly competes if not surpasses Snapdragon with its newer Dimensity chips. So stick around for more, as we will be covering the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4/8 Elite release and revisit this comparison in the near future.