The expectations that we have of the small devices that we know as smartphones have gotten even more colossal as the years have gone by. While the average person uses their phone to browse the web, use social media, take pictures, and watch content, SoC manufacturers have continued to push the ceiling higher for the power users.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite and MediaTek Dimensity 9400 are both terrifically capable chips, but that's never really enough in the tech world, as next cycle's product needs to somehow be better than the last. MediaTek is demonstrating that, with the launch of the Dimensity 9400+. It is bringing even more power.
The MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ Amps Up the Clock Speed on an Already Top-of-the-Line Processor
The MediaTek Dimensity 9400 is not a slouch in any shape or form. Sure, the Snapdragon 8 Elite might edge it out in raw power, but not to an extent that should drastically influence which chip you side with. It uses an All Big Core structure for the processor, consisting of one major Arm Cortex-X925 core clocked at up to 3.62GHz, and that comes with three Cortex-X4 cores and four Cortex-A720, all of which are performance cores.
Today, the chip maker has announced its mid-cycle upgrade in the form of the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, which manages to push the ceiling even higher in terms of the amount of performance that MediaTek has been able to squeeze into a chip. While most of the processor specs remain the same—it's still an octacore processor with a 1-3-4 structure—that “1”, the most performance-focused core, gets an upgrade.
The Arm Cortex-X925 core pushes the maximum 3.62GHz clock speed up to 3.73GHz, which brings it another step closer to crossing that 4GHz threshold. I never thought I'd see the day when smartphone processors got that fast, but we're already there, especially as Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite can top out at 4.32GHz. MediaTek is getting closer to that exclusive club.
The Other Specifications of the Dimensity 9400+ Stick Close to the 9400's Blueprint
Besides that push in the CPU clock speed department, you might wonder what else changes with the new chip. The answer to that is “very little”. That's not necessarily a bad thing, considering that the Dimensity 9400 was already a killer chip to have in your phone.
The SoC continues to support LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4 storage, and all the connectivity and modem specifications remain the same (with 5G, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 6.0). The imaging chip, GPU, and the NPU all remain the same as well, so it isn't inaccurate to say that the direct performance boost is the major reason for any OEM to opt for this chip instead.
There are some minor reasons, though. MediaTek says it has improved the Agentic AI Engine (supposedly compared to the 9400), which should provide 20% quicker agentic AI performance and better efficiency with multi-modal AI. Plus, it now comes with on-device support for DeepSeek-R1. The new MFRC 2.0 tech also improves your gaming performance, and Bluetooth range is allegedly 6.6x longer than the 9400.
