MediaTek on Monday announced its newest silicon for top-tier Android phones, the Dimensity 9300. Along with incremental improvements to performance and battery life, the chip also adds something expected to be all the rage in 2024: on-device generative AI.
Phone manufacturers that build their own chips have been introducing AI features, like Google’s Tensor silicon enabling Magic Editor and Live Translation, but generative AI has become the new frontier for mobile AI.
MediaTek’s announcement comes weeks after Qualcomm revealed its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which is set to bring on-device generative AI to phones it powers, starting with the just-launched Xiaomi 14. This pits the two chip companies in a race to see which phonemakers will be excited enough by either chip’s features. MediaTek expects the first phones with the Dimensity 9300 to launch soon.
Read more: I Could’ve Used Qualcomm’s ChatGPT-Like Phone AI on My Trip to Hawaii
As far as the chip’s capabilities go, MediaTek isn’t as bullish as Qualcomm on generative AI. Though the Dimensity 9300 seems to be in the ballpark of Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, MediaTek’s chip takes less than a second to generate a Stable Diffusion image and can run 7 billion parameter AI models at 20 tokens per second. It can also run 13 billion parameter models and up to a maximum 33 billion parameters with reduced tokens per second. Ultimately, this gives the chip a bit more longevity as more robust language models come into use.
Instead, MediaTek touted the Dimensity 9300 for its 46% better peak performance and 40% lower power needed to meet the performance on last year’s Dimensity 9200 chip. The new silicon also has 46% better ray tracing than its predecessor. MediaTek made a direct comparison to Qualcomm’s just-launched chip, saying the Dimensity 9300 scored over 7,600 in a real device on the benchmark Geekbench 6.0 compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 scoring 7,501 in what MediaTek called a “lab environment.” CNET ran Geekbench 6 test on a sample…
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