MediaTek Dimensity 8400 now official with all big core CPU, a first for its segment

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9300 launched last year was the first Android SoC to go with an all big core configuration for its CPU, something this year’s Dimensity 9400 also went with, but those are both top of the line chipsets.

Today marks the introduction of the first upper-midrange SoC with an all big core CPU. Meet the MediaTek Dimensity 8400, which is sure to pose a big threat, performance-wise, to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3, which has been the uncontested king of this category for quite a while now.

The Dimensity 8400 comes with eight Cortex-A725 CPU cores, clocked at up to 3.25 GHz. Note that while MediaTek hasn’t broken down the clock speed per core, this is likely to only be achieved by one of them, not all.

Compared to the Dimensity 8300, MediaTek claims a 41% improvement in multi-core performance. The company also boasts 44% less peak power use, up to 100% more L2 cache, 50% more L3 cache, and 25% more SLC cache. The chip supports up to WQHD+ screens at up to 144 Hz refresh rate, LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0 storage, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.4.

The CPU is paired with the Arm Mali-G720 MC7 GPU, which brings 24% higher peak performance and 42% less power use. You can also expect touch latency optimizations as well. The MediaTek NPU 880 that’s in the Dimensity 8400 is 20% faster in integer/floating-point operations (33% in large language model text generation), improves efficiency by 18%, and is 21% better in Stable Diffusion 1.5 too.

The SoC has the Imagiq 1080 ISP which supports 320 MP sensors, in-sensor zoom with 100% PDAF, HDR video recording throughout the entire zoom range, and it uses 12% less power in 4K HDR video capture. Finally, the new 5G-A modem comes with up to 5.17Gbps download performance.

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