MediaTek Dimensity 8400: First Upper-Midrange SoC with All Big Core CPU

MediaTek has officially launched the Dimensity 8400, the first upper-midrange System on Chip (SoC) with an all big core CPU.

This new chip is set to challenge Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, which has dominated the category for a while.

The Dimensity 8400 features eight Cortex-A725 cores, clocked at up to 3.25 GHz. While the exact clock speed per core isn’t specified, this high clock speed is likely for just one core.

Compared to its predecessor, the Dimensity 8300, MediaTek claims a 41% improvement in multi-core performance.

The chip also uses 44% less peak power, includes up to 100% more L2 cache, 50% more L3 cache, and 25% more SLC cache.

It supports WQHD+ displays with up to 144 Hz refresh rate, LPDDR5X RAM, UFS 4.0 storage, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.4.

The Dimensity 8400 is paired with the Arm Mali-G720 MC7 GPU, which delivers 24% higher peak performance and 42% lower power consumption.

The MediaTek NPU 880 is 20% faster in integer and floating-point operations, 33% faster in large language model text generation, and 21% better in Stable Diffusion 1.5.

For photography, the SoC features the Imagiq 1080 ISP, which supports 320 MP sensors, in-sensor zoom, HDR video recording, and 4K HDR video capture with 12% less power usage. The new 5G-A modem offers download speeds of up to 5.17 Gbps.