OPINION: On the heels of Qualcomm announcing its flagship Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 at the end of October, MediaTek this week unveiled the high-end chipset it hopes will be used in flagship phones in 2024: the MediaTek Dimensity 9300. It’s more capable than Qualcomm’s option, but unfortunately It doesn’t really matter to us in the Western market.

Qualcomm stunned the smartphone world with the announcement of the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. It offers all the usual gains you expect from smartphones, such as a 30% speed increase in the CPU department, 25% improved GPU performance, and a whopping 98% boost. The NPU department, however, has taken it a step further by introducing in-device generative AI capabilities.

This essentially means that the chipset can handle ChatGPT-style tasks like writing emails or creating new images using stable distribution, all on the device and without needing an internet connection. Meta claims it can run at up to 15 TOPS (Tokens Per Second, essentially how fast the on-device AI can perform) on the Llama 2 language model.

Considering that most current AI Gen activities require an internet connection, thus reducing your privacy and how it can be used, this is a huge step forward and Qualcomm has provided manufacturers with a number of new AI tools that they can implement using the chipset in their 2024 flagships.

I’ll be honest, when I sat down for the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 media briefing, I expected it to pale in comparison to the power of the 8th Gen 3 – but I was pleasantly surprised, if not completely shocked.

This is because MediaTek claims that the chipset outperforms the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 in early CPU and GPU benchmark tests, according to results published by Qualcomm at the Snapdragon Summit. This largely depends on the chipset architecture; MediaTek is taking a wildly different approach to Qualcomm with its all-new ‘Big Core’ chip design.

Essentially, instead of having multiple cores like the 8th Gen 3’s combination of one main core, five performance cores, and two efficiency cores, the Dimensity 9300 has one ultra-major core and four efficiency cores for performance.

This represents a 40% increase in the CPU department, and the new ARM Immortalis-G720 GPU has a 46% increase; MediaTek claims that this has no negative impact on battery efficiency, mainly because you can replace the ultra-large core. getting the job done faster and more efficiently than multiple low-power cores could do.

These impressive gains are also reflected in AI performance; The Dimensity 9300 also has on-device Gen AI capabilities at an impressive 20 TOPS, beating the 15 TOPS of the 8th Gen 3.

It looks like an incredibly capable chipset then, but unfortunately it doesn’t really matter because it will almost certainly not be used by any flagship smartphones in the Western market. From where? Because that’s actually what happened with this year’s flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9200.

This doesn’t mean MediaTek’s mobile chips aren’t used in any Western smartphones. Oppo Find N2 Flip supports Dimensity 9000+, while Motorola Edge 40 supports Dimensity 8020; only rare high-end chipsets.

In fact, in 2023 Trusted Reviews only tested two phones with the flagship-level Dimensity 9200 that were overclocked to 9200+ (Vivo

Elaborating on this further, MediaTek did not seem very optimistic about the Dimensity 9300 chipset making its way to Western-focused smartphones in its media pre-briefing, and did not mention a manufacturer that will use the chipset in the coming months.

Compared to Qualcomm, which proudly announced that leading brands, including Xiaomi, will use the 8th Gen 14 in the Xiaomi 3, this definitely does not bode well for MediaTek’s future in the Western market.

While the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 looks set to offer the best performance of any 2024 mobile chipset, that doesn’t really matter to anyone outside of MediaTek’s core Asian market – and that’s a huge shame.