What you need to know
- Chipmaker MediaTek announced the new Dimensity 8300, an octa-core CPU.
- It uses four Arm Cortex-A715 and four Cortex-A510 cores, along with a Mali-G615 GPU.
- It also supports 5G, Wi-Fi 6E, 4K60 videos, UFS 4.0 memory, and a significant AI boost.
- Phones with the Dimensity 8300 will be released by year's end, but MediaTek hasn't announced any specific models yet.
MediaTek and Qualcomm are close rivals targeting the same Android phones with their business. So it makes sense that the high-end MediaTek Dimensity 8300 SoC, announced on Tuesday, sounds so similar to the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 from just a week prior.
Only a couple of weeks after its flagship Dimensity 9300 announcement, MediaTek closed its recent media summit by unveiling its more affordable silicon sibling. The 4nm Dimensity 8300 uses Arm's v9 CPU architecture, with four Cortex-A715 and four Cortex-A510 cores.
If that sounds familiar, it's because the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 uses the exact same cores. We don't officially know how the Dimensity 8300's cores are clocked, whereas Qualcomm clocks one A715 at 2.63GHz and the other three at 2.4GHz.
A recent Digital Chat Station leak (via Gizmochina) suggests the 8300 could hit as high as 3.35GHz for one A715 and 3.2GHz for the other three, which would dwarf what the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 offers. Notebookcheck spotted a Geekbench listing of an unreleased Redmi K70 phone supposedly running the 8300, with these same clock speeds. But we'll have to wait for official confirmation.
The Dimensity 8300 also employs an Arm Mali-G615 GPU that's 60% more powerful and 55% more efficient than the GPU found in last year's Dimensity 8200, according to MediaTek.
The biggest upgrade, however, is in AI performance. MediaTek promises a "3.3X AI performance" boost and specifically says its "transformer-based generative AI" performance is eight times faster than the last generation.
Evidently, MediaTek is counting on more users caring about large language models (LLM) like Meta's Llama 2. Despite recent AI drama like OpenAI's fired CEO and Google's Gemini AI delays, we can assume that AI usage will continue to grow in upcoming years, making this upgrade potentially more useful than standard performance boosts.
Rounding out the other announced specs, the MediaTek Dimensity 8300 uses LP5x 8533Mbps memory, UFS 4.0 memory, and WiFi 6E with 160MHz bandwidth.
While we don't know which Android phones will use the Dimensity 8300 yet, MediaTek promises you'll first see the chip before the end of 2023. As the brand has yet to really expand deeply to the North American market, you'll most likely see brands like OPPO, Vivo, and Redmi adopt the 8300, as they adopted the 8200.
