Summary

  • MediaTek’s new Dimensity 7400 and 7400x processors are a minor upgrade from last year’s models.
  • The chips feature slightly faster performance cores and a marginally improved NPU.
  • The new processors seem like a rebranding of existing hardware, offering no major advancements.

Qualcomm and MediaTek are neck and neck as the biggest SoC outfitters for the best Android phones today, rivaled sometimes by Samsung’s Exynos range. In this battle of one-upmanship, MediaTek just announced a new pair of processors designed to power the next crop of mid-range Android devices launching later this year. However, it doesn’t seem to be much more than a rebranding of existing hardware.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite


Related


I hope the 7-core Snapdragon 8 Elite is not the last of its kind

No more performance, please



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MediaTek just pulled the wraps off this year’s mid-range processors, incrementally numbered as Dimensity 7400 and 7400X since they succeeded the 7300 series (via SamMobile). Both chips are built on the 4nm process node perfected by TSMC, in octa-core configurations. The 7400 packs four ARM Cortex-A78 performance cores at 2.6GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores at a slower 2GHz for efficiency. Graphics duties are handled by a Mali-G615 MC2 chip on both new releases with support for LPDDR4x and LPDDR5 memory and UFS3.1 storage. The GPU drives a WFHD+ display at up to 120Hz or a FHD+ at 144Hz.

Both the chips also share support for up to 3.27Gbps downlink through 5G, carrier aggregation, and Wi-Fi 6E. Bluetooth version 5.4 is also supported along with NPU 655 for onboard AI task handling. MediaTek has offered the Imagiq 950 Image signal processor (ISP) on the Dimensity 7400 and 7400X, supporting 200MP sensors and up to 4K recording at 30fps with EIS in HDR. Support for Google’s Ultra HDR recording is available too.

No major upgrades from last year

This is the Dimensity 7300 with a new version number

MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chip held in a hand with the silicon facing the camera

If you feel you have seen the same specs on a boatload of MediaTek-powered devices all through 2023, you aren’t mistaken. It appears the company has decided to play it safe and give the same chip a new badge, so consumers still believe they’re getting the latest hardware.

We still haven’t seen a device hit store shelves with the new silicon, so there could be perceptible improvements, but on paper, the performance cores this year are clocked 0.1GHz faster than last year, and the NPU 655 is supposedly 15% better than the NPU on the Dimensity 7300 and 7300X.

Phones powered by the new MediaTek Dimensity 7400 and 7400X will hit store shelves in the first quarter of this year, but we wouldn’t expect them to shake up the market, packing last year’s processing horsepower.