Another day, another new Dimensity chip—the battle for smartphone processor supremacy has undoubtedly become more intense in the past few years, with big brands like MediaTek and Qualcomm each pumping out some of the most impressive silicon that we’ve seen on mobile devices. This week, it’s MediaTek that’s in the spotlight with the announcement of the new Dimensity 8450 chip, which is designed for upper midrange devices.
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The Dimensity 8450 features an All Big Core CPU design, and MediaTek has included eight Arm Cortex-A725 processors which are designed for performance, in addition to large in-chip caches developed for improved data accessibility. MediaTek claims that benchmark test scores with the Dimensity 8450 show up to 41% higher multi-core performance and up to 44% greater power efficiency compared to previous models, alongside cache improvements with up to 100% more L2 cache, 50% more L3 cache, and 25% more SLC cache.
For graphics and gaming duties, there’s an Arm Mali-G720 MC7 GPU that’s designed to reduce memory bandwidth requirements by 30%, with further power savings made possible via MediaTek’s Frame Rate Converter (MFRC). Additionally, MediaTek HyperEngine Adaptive Gaming Technology (MAGT) 3.0 is likewise present, and includes features like touch latency optimizations and a Network Observation System (NOS) for 5G/Wi-Fi switching—MediaTek says that this setup resulted in around a 24% higher peak performance and a 42% reduction in power consumption.
As for AI capabilities, the built-in NPU 880 is designed to support a range of generative AI models, including LLMs, SLMs, and LMMs, and works alongside a Dimensity Agentic AI Engine (DAE), and comes with enhancements to the MediaTek NeuroPilot toolkit. Not to get too “nerdy” on here but according to MediaTek’s numbers, the new chip’s AI performance metrics show a 20% increase in integer/floating-point operations and 18% higher power efficiency, while specific AI tasks show a 33% acceleration in text generation and 21% faster processing in Stable Diffusion v1.5.
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As for photo and video support, the Dimensity 8450 enhances camera performance with its in-sensor zoom technology which can improve the resolution of zoomed images, at least on paper. Other features include support for 100% PDAF (Phase Detection Autofocus) and HDR video recording across the entire zoom range. We can expect to see the Dimensity 8450 in upcoming smartphones in the following months.
