Processors, the chips that power our smartphones, can often be overlooked, remembered only by their catchy name. Provided they work, don’t overheat, and incrementally deliver more power and performance every year, it’s hard to get too excited over them, especially when a lot of the magic happens in the background without us even being aware of it.
Related It’s the world’s first smartphone chip to use an all-big-core design. MediaTek and partner TSMC have built the 4nm+ Dimensity 9300 differently to its previous flagship chips and differently to the approach taken by Qualcomm for the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, too. The all-big-core design consists of one ultra-large ARM Cortex X4 chip running at 3.25GHz, another three more ARM Cortex X4 running at 2.85GHz, and finally, four big ARM Cortex A720 running at 2GHz.
According to MediaTek, the changes made with the Dimensity 9300 have shown improvements over the Dimensity 9200, which uses the big.LITTLE concept of combining large and small cores. Compared to the previous generation, the 9300 has a 15% increase in single-core performance and a 40% increase in multi-core performance. It also says the chip produces higher performance with better efficiency, with a reduction in power consumption of between 10% and 15% compared to the 9200.
What could possibly go wrong? The more powerful the processor, the more heat it will generate, and early on, rumors about the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 indicated dissipating that heat was causing a few problems.