If a smartphone were a plate of good food, chipset would definitely be the vegetable Everyone knows that the chipset is important, but it's hard to care more about the chipset than an attractive camera or a sweet display, unless you do something as drastic as slathering it with bacon bits (But as the core that makes a phone work, it's important to know about these chip upgrades That's why knowing about MediaTek's new flagship chip, the Dimensity 9400, will put you on the inside track when it comes to the best Android phones of 2025

We already knew that the new Dimensity 9000 series chips were coming, but MediaTek has announced some major changes that should result in pleasing performance and efficiency improvements for the average user They focus on photography, gaming, and of course AI

First, the Dimensity 9400 is manufactured in a 3nm process, which is currently the smallest and most advanced manufacturing method for a chipset This puts MediaTek's best silicon finally on par with Apple, which has been using 3nm chips since the A17 Pro in 2023, and surpasses Qualcomm, whose 4nm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is in many of the top performing Android phones this year Significantly

A smartphone's system-on-chip (affectionately called a SoC) combines components such as the CPU and GPU into a single piece of silicon, not several separate parts connected by cables as in a traditional PC The CPU in the Dimensity 9400 also features the “All Big Core Design” first used in the Dimensity 9300 This means that instead of using slower, lower-performing CPU cores, only expensive CPU cores are used to improve power and efficiency

This is similar to the approach Apple is taking with its A-series chips, but is the opposite of the combination of high and low power cores used in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 or similar Qualcomm chips

Joining the CPU is a 12-core Immortalis GPU, which is twice the number of GPU cores in the Apple A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro and is expected to show higher performance than this already impressive chip also appears to offer PC-level ray tracing technology by using Opacity Micromaps, a graphics system that helps the GPU ray trace highly detailed objects with less effort

The third part of the chip is the NPU, which is designed to take care of AI needs A major upgrade to this part of the new Dimensity silicon is the Dimensity Agentic AI Engine (DAE), which acts as a standardized framework connecting apps and cloud services, allowing AI assistants to complete tasks with less involvement It is designed to enable AI assistants to complete tasks with less involvement Qualcomm just announced something similar with its AI Orchestrator, but has yet to reveal where it will be used [The Dimensity 9400 is powered by an 8th generation NPU, and LoRA training, a tool for customizing the output of AI image models, is apparently a world first With the promise of multimodal AI performance of over 50 tokens per second, the 9400 should hopefully be able to generate these customized images at practical speeds as well

While not an explicit subsection of the Dimensity 9400, one major new feature that this chip will unlock for smartphones is support for tri-fold displays; only the Huawei Mate XT makes this foldable phone idea a reality Only the Huawei Mate XT has succeeded in making this foldable phone idea a reality, but if other companies want to try this, MediaTek is ready to help make it a reality without having to do the groundwork themselves

As part of MediaTek's chipset announcement, Oppo took the stage and announced that its Find X8 series flagship phones will use the Dimensity 9400 and that these models will be available globally (from previous announcements (although, based on previous announcements, these models will probably not be released in the US) Oppo is deeply involved with OnePlus, because OnePlus is the phone maker you are more familiar with And rumors suggest that the 9400 chip may also be in the OnePlus 13 instead of the next-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon chip The OnePlus 12, for example, is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3

Also, given that Samsung has the Dimensity 9300 Plus in its Galaxy Tab S10 Plus and Tab S10 Ultra tablets, 2025 is the year your new Android phone or tablet will replace Qualcomm with MediaTek's silicon and could be the year they get better, even if the Dimensity 9400's closest competitor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, scores impressively in the rumored pre-release benchmarks, which are clearly going to be expensive this year and costs could be passed on to users by handset makers

But there is still some waiting to be done before this is all certain Qualcomm should introduce the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 to the world at its annual technology summit later this month, and we should test phones with both chips to see which performs better But for smartphone users who value efficient performance, MediaTek and its Dimensity 9400 are two to track closely