MediaTek officially released the Dimensity 9400, the flagship 5G AI chip of the year. As a blockbuster for the Android flagship market in 2025, the Dimensity 9400 has made significant upgrades in performance, power consumption, AI and other aspects, and its comprehensive performance can be called the flagship performance benchmark.
At present, the flagship mobile phone market is fiercely competitive, and the large-scale application of AI technology is expected to detonate the next round of new changes in the mobile phone industry. At a critical juncture, the Dimensity 9400, as a representative of intelligent AI chips, deserves our attention and interpretation.
It is still the strongest mobile performance in 2025
As a flagship processor, performance is naturally the most concerned aspect every year.
The Dimensity 9400 delivers a 35% single-core and 28% multi-core performance improvement over the previous generation Dimensity 9300. Taking the familiar Antutu results as a reference, in the laboratory environment, the Antutu score of Dimensity 9400 exceeded 3 million.
To be able to achieve such a strong performance, the "hardware foundation" of the Dimensity 9400 is of course the basic guarantee. First of all, in terms of CPU, the Dimensity 9400 still adopts an all-large core design, but compared with the previous generation, the Dimensity 9400 has also upgraded a Cortex-X925 @3.626GHz super core based on ARM v9.2 architecture.
The ultra-large core Cortex-X925 is Arm's latest performance core, which is specially designed for the 3nm process and adopts a PC-level architecture design. In the Geekbench 6.2 benchmark, the Cortex-X925 improved IPC (instructions per clock cycle) performance by 15%. In order to further improve the processing capacity of prefetched data and complex instructions, the Dimensity 9400 has also greatly increased the cache this time, including a 100% increase in the L2 cache and a 50% increase in the L3 cache. At the same time, the vector pipeline of Cortex-X925 brings a 50% increase in computing performance (TOPS) of Integer8 to meet the current demand for hot AI applications.
In terms of memory and graphics performance, the Dimensity 9400 will also be fully configured. Launched the world's fastest Samsung 10.7Gbps LPDDR5X memory, improving performance by 25%. The new 12-core GPU Immortalis-G925 has a 41% increase in peak performance compared to the Dimensity 9300. According to the test data, in the GFXbench Aztec scenario, the performance of the Dimensity 9400 is increased by 38%; Manhattan 1080 P increased by 18%; 3D Mark-solar bay project, performance increased by 40%; 3D Mark – Project Punta, 111% performance improvement.
There is no doubt that the Dimensity 9400 is one of the most powerful mobile chips in 2025.
In the era of full frames, energy efficiency is king
You may also notice that this time the Dimensity 9400 is not as aggressive as imagined in terms of the frequency of the large core. The main reason why it did not "soar" on the frequency of super-large cores is that the Dimensity 9400 pays special attention to energy efficiency.
As a mobile phone chip, in addition to strong performance, excellent energy efficiency is crucial. Especially for products with an "all-large core" design like the Dimensity 9400, the power consumption performance largely determines the sustainability and stability of the performance release, which is of more practical significance for users in daily complex application scenarios.
The Dimensity 9400 embodies the concept of "energy efficiency is king" in many ways, such as using Samsung's fastest LPDDR5X memory, its world's fastest 10.7Gbps rate, which can complete tasks at a faster rate in some scenarios that need to process large amounts of data, high-speed network connections, or run high-load applications, thereby reducing overall power consumption. According to official data, the Dimensity 9400 memory has a 25% reduction in power consumption on the basis of a 25% increase in performance.
As mentioned earlier, the Dimensity 9400 has achieved a 28% improvement in multi-core performance compared to its predecessor, the Dimensity 9300. In order to achieve both high performance and low power consumption, the Dimensity 9400 introduces the Dimensity scheduling engine, which dynamically schedules performance and energy efficiency through front-end application computing power tilting, real-time detection and perception adjustment, and special routing of key resources. As a result, the Dimensity 9400's peak multi-core performance reduces power consumption by a full 40% compared to the previous generation.
Powerful performance and excellent power consumption ensure that the mobile phone can achieve a longer performance release in heavy performance release scenarios. Especially in some heavy mobile gaming scenarios, this means that you can achieve lower heat and longer battery life with better image quality and higher frame rates. This is of great significance for the improvement of user experience.
Of course, good energy efficiency also ensures the introduction of more advanced gaming technologies. The Dimensity 9400 is equipped with the G925 GPU core, which brings PC-level ray tracing technology, which saves 44% of power consumption while improving peak performance by 41% compared to the previous generation. The Dimensity 9400 also introduces a new ray tracing technology, the OMM light tracking engine, which can turn on ray tracing at a high frame rate of 90 frames in "Dark Zone Breakout". This is unimaginable without the guarantee of superior energy efficiency.
Thanks to the powerful scheduling strategy of the Dimensity 9400, the Dimensity 9400 has also achieved an overall increase in power consumption in daily high-frequency applications. For example, in scenarios such as Douyin live streaming, music streaming, and WeChat video calls, the Dimensity 9400 reduces power consumption by 13% compared to the Dimensity 9300. In the WiFi download scenario, the Dimensity 9400 has reduced power consumption by 32% compared with the previous generation. The Dimensity 9400 also optimizes power consumption for video recording and photo shooting, reducing power consumption by up to 14% compared to the previous generation for 4K60fps video recording.
It can be seen that the Dimensity 9400's optimization of power consumption this time is all-round, full-link, and all-scenario. In MediaTek's view, the energy efficiency performance of the mobile phone processor is as important as the performance performance, which is also the biggest difference between the Dimensity 9400 and its competitors in terms of product ideas.
The Dimensity 9400 is a 5G intelligent body AI chip
In addition to its powerful performance and excellent energy efficiency, another highlight of the Dimensity 9400 this time is AI.
At this juncture, the widespread application of AI has become the consensus of the whole industry. Especially for mobile devices, it is the most frequently used and familiar smart device by consumers every day. AI phones are not a pure concept, they have become the next evolution of the smartphone industry. As a processor that provides underlying computing power and performance support, its AI performance largely determines the lower limit of mobile phone AI performance.
In fact, MediaTek's definition of the Dimensity 9400 chip is "flagship 5G intelligent body AI chip". The Dimensity 9400 integrates the 8th generation AI processor NPU 890, which is the first NPU to support LoRA training and high-quality video generation on the device. Compared with the previous generation, the Dimensity 9400's large language model (LLM) has an 80% improvement in prompt word processing performance and a 35% power saving.
With powerful AI performance, the Dimensity 9400 is capable of completing many AI applications. For example, based on the powerful device-side AI capability, AI avatar photos can be directly generated on the Dimensity 9400 mobile phone, and AI videos can even be generated. In terms of AI long text processing, the Dimensity 9400 has increased the AI long text length by 8 times. Various complex tasks can be handled through AI on the mobile phone.
In addition to its powerful AI performance, the Dimensity 9400 is also integrated with MediaTek's Dimensity Agentic AI Engine to facilitate developers to create advanced AI applications. The biggest role of this engine is to provide a unified standard interface between AI agents, third-party apps, and large models, and realize the series connection of AI across applications. With the Dimensity AI intelligent engine, it can not only efficiently run edge AI computing and cloud services, but also shorten the development cycle of AI products, helping developers build AI applications more conveniently, or upgrade traditional applications to AI applications.
In other words, MediaTek not only wants to make a AI chip with the most powerful performance, but also wants to build a Dimensity AI intelligent ecosystem through its own platform capabilities. Under this ecosystem, developers can easily develop AI applications with innovative experiences, and users can obtain a more efficient and convenient experience through AI-empowered capabilities.
What should an AI phone look like?
Looking back, Dimensity has been leading the technological change and development of the entire industry over the years.
Since its inception, Dimensity has been setting new records for mobile phone performance. Over the years, Dimensity has continuously improved the performance of flagship cores through the improvement of processes, processes and architectures. In the early years, there were many voices of "excess performance" in the mobile phone market, but in the end, it turned out that there was no "excess" of performance, only growing user demand. As a processor that provides underlying support for mobile phones, only by showing strong enough hard power can we continue to promote the user experience of the entire industry to a higher standard.
After meeting the performance requirements, Dimensity did not stop exploring. After seeing the user's demand for extreme performance and lower power consumption, the Dimensity platform took the lead in the industry to come up with an "all-large-core" architecture, and through the all-large-core design and more flexible and scientific scheduling strategy, Dimensity has achieved a balance of high performance and low power consumption. This is a step further than the traditional way of seeking to improve the performance of processors by improving the process and the performance of CPUs and GPUs. Later, everyone also saw that the architecture design of the whole core has become the object of imitation by the whole industry.
Going back to the Dimensity 9400 processor itself, it is clear that the Dimensity is paving the way for the AI era. In the future, the large-scale application of AI will make profound changes to the software and hardware ecology of future smartphones. In addition to the powerful performance of an AI mobile phone, the ubiquitous AI also puts forward higher requirements for the battery life and power consumption of the device. This is also the core reason why the Dimensity 9400 has achieved such strong performance on the basis of energy efficiency.
Going deeper, from the construction of the AI ecosystem to the privacy and personal information protection of users in the AI era, the upstream and downstream of the industry in the future AI era need to focus on the directions. On the Dimensity 9400, we have already seen the results and efforts made by MediaTek. For MediaTek, the construction of this ecosystem is also conducive to consolidating its own experience "moat" and further demonstrating the experience advantages of Dimensity products.
Through the many features of the Dimensity 9400, we may have a glimpse of what the future AI phone will look like. From this point of view, the Dimensity 9400 is actually a product that is planning for the next AI era.