TL;DR
- MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9400 Plus flagship processor.
- This brings a few performance, AI, and connectivity upgrades over the standard chip.
- The first phones with the Dimensity 9400 Plus chip will launch later this month.
MediaTek launched its Dimensity 9400 flagship processor late last year, and it’s a compelling alternative to the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. Now, the Taiwanese brand has revealed the Dimensity 9400 Plus.
This chip is identical to the standard Dimensity 9400 in almost every way, although we do see some CPU, AI, and connectivity upgrades. Perhaps the most impressive upgrade is that the chip now supports phone-to-phone Bluetooth connections over 10 kilometers (6.2 miles), up from 1.5 kilometers on the Dimensity 9400. That’s a major upgrade, and we’ve seen brands like vivo, OPPO, and OnePlus recently adopt long-distance Bluetooth communication. So I’m interested to see what OEMs do with this improved tech.
Dimensity 9400 Plus gets CPU and AI upgrades
The most notable performance upgrade is a 100MHz clock speed boost for the sole Cortex-X925 big CPU core, going from 3.63GHz to 3.73GHz. The other cores are clocked at the same frequency as before, which means three Cortex-X4 cores at 3.3GHz and four Cortex-A720 cores at 2.4GHz. This is accompanied by 10MB of system-level cache and 12MB of L3 cache. So we’re expecting a modest single-core CPU performance boost, but nothing major.
MediaTek is still using the NPU 890 AI silicon in this chipset, but it now offers Speculative Decoding Plus (SpD+) support. This technique predicts the next tokens in parallel, with the large language model (LLM) then able to choose the correct one. According to the chipmaker, this support enables up to 20% faster agentic AI performance.
Staying with AI, the company also says that the new chipset specifically supports the DeepSeek R1 Distill LLMs (ranging from 1.5 billion to eight billion parameter models) running on-device. A MediaTek executive noted during a media briefing that the standard Dimensity 9400 should be able to support these AI models as well, but would likely be “a little less capable” than the Dimensity 9400 Plus.
Dimensity 9400 Plus: What else does it bring to the table?
Another notable Dimensity 9400 Plus upgrade is support for low-voltage batteries. The company says this support enables either longer battery life or facilitates a smaller/lighter device by using a smaller battery. Finally, MediaTek is also bringing improved BeiDou satellite support, delivering a 33% faster TTFF (time to first fix).
Otherwise, the refreshed chip offers the same features as the standard Dimensity 9400. That means an Arm Immortalis-G925 MC12 GPU, a Release 17 5G modem topping out at 7Gbps downlink speeds, and some notable camera features. The latter includes a Gen-AI Telephoto feature for improved long-range camera zoom, full-range HDR zoom, and AI Audio Focus tech.
In any event, we don’t expect the Dimensity 9400 Plus to beat the Snapdragon 8 Elite when it comes to peak CPU performance. However, the standard chip was able to beat several Snapdragon-toting flagships when it comes to sustained graphical performance. So you definitely can’t go wrong with a phone powered by MediaTek’s flagship silicon if you want to play advanced games.
Speaking of phones, MediaTek says the first devices with the Dimensity 9400 Plus chip will launch later this month. The company also confirmed to Android Authority that Dimensity 9400 series devices would be available in the US later this year, but was unable to share specific details.
