The Dimensity 9400 to have the biggest die size in a smartphone chip

MediaTek’s flagship chipsets are becoming increasingly popular for their value proposition. The company even managed to outperform Qualcomm in terms of market share in Q4 2023. MediaTek seems to be currently working on a new flagship SoC for Android, termed MediaTek Dimensity 9400, and it has already started gathering the attention of the crowd. It’s been said that it might have the biggest die size for a smartphone chipset.

MediaTek Dimensity 9400 will have the biggest die size with over 30 billion transistors

MediaTek is working diligently on its upcoming chipset, and the efforts seem to be visible. According to reports, the Dimensity 9400 will have a die size measuring dimensions of 150mm², which is even bigger than NVIDIA’s GT 1030, which measures 74mm². This gives the chipset the largest die size to date on a smartphone chipset, and it’s intriguing to say that being a smartphone chipset, it is very close to a desktop chipset in terms of die size.

Increasing the chipset’s die size is expensive, but it does have its own set of advantages. For example, the chipset can accommodate more transistors, a higher cache, and a bigger neural processing unit.

The Dimensity 9400, owing to the larger die size, will have over 30 billion transistors. This is 32% higher than the total of 22.7 billion transistors found on the Dimensity 9300.

A Bigger die size may cause overheating and other issues

Well, having a bigger die size for a chipset is not all rosy for the MediaTek Dimensity 9400. It can add several additional manufacturing-related costs to the chipset, which would possibly end up giving it the title of MediaTek’s most expensive smartphone chip. On top of this, it is going to build it on a TSMC 3nm fabrication process, and therefore, expecting the chip to be cheaper would be completely pointless.

To add further, there have been reports that the Dimensity 9400 may heat up as it prioritizes the raw performance cores over ARM’s power efficiency cores. This is usually the case with almost all of the chipsets having higher-clocked CPUs. It’s likely not the die size to blame. The heating could be due to the ARM’s Cortex X5 CPU and we should not draw any final conclusion before the commercial release of the chipset.