MediaTek’s new smartphone chip seems too good to be true

Weeks after introducing a very promising flagship chip for Android phones that rivals Qualcomm’s best, MediaTek is taking the competition up a notch. The latest from the Taiwanese firm is the Dimensity 8300, which goes straight ahead of the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3.

Overall, this seems to be one of the best mid-range processors that MediaTek has offered in a long time, both in terms of inherent capabilities and generation-to-generation upgrades. The first wave of phones powered by the Dimensity 8300 will arrive by the end of this year.

Notably, compared to Qualcomm’s noticeably lazy mid-tier upgrade in the Snapdragon 7 series, MediaTek’s new chip brings significant improvements across the board. Based on the same 4nm process as its predecessor, the Dimensity 8300 uses the new ARM V9-based Cortex cores.

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We are looking at an enhanced 4+4 cluster of Cortex A715 cores and an equal number of Cortex A510 cores. MediaTek claims a 20% increase in processing firepower and a healthy 30% increase in power efficiency.

For gaming and other demanding tasks, MediaTek has opted for the new Mali-G615 GPU which offers a whopping 60% increase in raw graphics prowess while being 50% more efficient in power consumption.

Of course, ’tis the season of AI everywhere, and MediaTek makes no secret of it. The Dimensity 8300 is one of the first mid-range processors capable of running generational AI models with up to 10 billion parameters.

That figure is what the flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 can handle, while MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 raises the bar up to 13 billion settings (with additional scaling).

These AI capabilities are delivered by the new APU 780 AI processor which can also handle stable streaming workflows such as text-to-image generation. Based on benchmark testing, it is 3.3 times more powerful and can handle generative AI tasks at an eight times faster rate.

RAM module support has been upgraded to the higher frequency channel of 8300 MHz, instead of the 6400 MHz type, providing a 33% improvement. In real smartphone life, you can expect faster multitasking and the ability to keep more active instances in the background.

The storage standard has also been upgraded from UFS 3.1 to UFS 4.0 speeds, promising double the read and write speeds compared to the Dimensity 8200. MediaTek’s latest also promises improvements to cellular and Wi-Fi connectivity, with peak download speeds of up to 5.17 Gbps on 5G and 2x bandwidth gain, respectively.

In the imaging department, the Dimensity 8300 will finally allow MediaTek-equipped Android phones to record 4K HDR video at 60 frames per second (fps), up from the 30fps limit imposed by its predecessor. It would be interesting to see how this full-featured chip compares to its Qualcomm rivals, but so far MediaTek seems to be on a roll this year.

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