MediaTek Dimensity 9300 may bring even bigger camera sensors to Android phones

The last few months of the year are always an opportunity for brands like Qualcomm and MediaTek to announce their latest and greatest chipsets, ones that power flagship smartphones throughout the year after. We recently had Qualcomm release the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, and now rival MediaTek has struck back with the Dimensity 9300.

What’s rather strange about the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is that’s its architecture includes only performance-cores, and zero efficiency cores. Of course, it is also the brand’s fastest and most powerful chipset in terms of flagship performance, gaming and camera capabilities as well. It also supports 320MP camera sensors, and may be the way for Android phones to final pack a sensor bigger than 200MP. Here’s all you need to know about the new chip.

MediaTek Dimensity 9300: What’s new?

The new MediaTek Dimensity 9300 is an octa-core chipset with one Cortex-X4 (3.25GHz), three Cortex-X4 (2.85GHz) and four Cortex A720 (2.0GHz) cores. Notably, the chip doesn’t feature any efficiency cores, with the for Cortex A720 cores seemingly optimised to clock 2.0GHz speeds when the chip isn’t running heavy loads.

ALSO READ: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset brings generative AI capabilities to your smartphone

The chip also comes with an Immortalis G720 GPU, which offers better performance over the Immortalis 715 from the Dimensity 9200, along with hardware-based ray-tracing, just like the new A17 Pro on the iPhone 15 Pro series. There is support for UFS 4.0 storage, LPDDR5T RAM and both sub-6GHz and mmWave 5G up to 7.9Gbps. Wi-Fi 7 support, meanwhile, can deliver speeds of up to 6.5Gbps.

The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 also supports Bluetooth 5.4, up to 320MP camera sensors via a new Imagiq 990 camera sensor, and video recording up to 8K at 30fps or 4K at 60fps. An APU 790 on the chipset runs AI tasks on-device, and supports Generative AI with Stable Diffusion and large language models (LLMs) with up to 33 billion parameters.

How powerful is the new MediaTek Dimensity 9300?

MediaTek claims that the Dimensity 9300 offers 40 per cent more peak performance over the Dimensity 9200, while also being efficient enough to use 33 per cent lesser power. This translates to faster load times, and significantly better battery life.

Compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the chip excels in some areas, and doesn’t in others. While it has the slower clock speed at prime loads (3.25GHz vs 3.3GHz), the Dimensity 9300 does support faster Wi-Fi 7 speeds (6.5Gbps vs 5.8Gbps) and support for bigger camera sensors (320MP vs 200MP). However, it does lose out on faster 5G speeds, where the Snapdragon reigns supreme (7.9Gbps vs 10Gbps).

It remains to be seen which smartphones will pack the new Dimensity 9300. The new Vivo X100 series set to debut in China later this week is expected to pack the chip, but in the Indian market, we could see other brands pick up the chip for value-flagship smartphones.