Mediatek Dimensity 9300: The Fastest SoC with a 46% Performance Drop in Just 15 Minutes

The smartphone world is dominated by Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung when it comes to brands producing chips that power these devices. However, of these three, only the first two are found in nearly all available smartphones, while Samsung limits itself primarily to its devices. This leaves MediaTek and Qualcomm as rivals vying for dominance in the entire sector. MediaTek surprised us with its Dimensity 9300, which turned out to be faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but now we see that it loses a significant portion of its performance due to thermal throttling.

When Qualcomm announced its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, we all saw it as a significant improvement over the previous generation. Both the CPU and GPU were 25-30% faster and more efficient, not bad considering there was only a 1-year gap between generations. The most impressive aspect was its NPU, with a 98% increase in AI performance, making it the leader in its range. This was good news for those who wanted a high-end Android phone with Snapdragon, but MediaTek managed to surpass it once again.

MediaTek Dimensity 9300 performance drops when subjected to stress tests

The MediaTek Dimensity 9300 SoC was recently unveiled, showing its performance and efficiency surpassed the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and even Apple’s A17 Pro. The CPU achieved around 5% higher performance while consuming the same power as the Snapdragon. In terms of GPU, it was 10% faster than the Adreno 750 while consuming notably less power than the previous generation. However, the GPU consumption was close to 13W, and although it outperformed the Apple A17 Pro by 30%, it also consumed more power.

In fact, months before its launch, a report emerged that the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 had high temperatures. Although the company assured the report was false, we now face the reality. The Vivo X100Pro with the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 only runs at 46% capacity due to the high temperature, resulting in the well-known effect of thermal throttling.

The Vivo X100Pro with a vapor chamber fails to prevent this issue

Despite achieving a maximum performance of 374,781 GIPS, the average was lower at 272,840 GIPS, due to a minimum of 158,157 GIPS near the end. This benchmark (CPU Throttling Test) is a stress test performed on the CPU, lasting 15 minutes in total. We can see the frequency reached a maximum of 3.25 GHz, but in the end, one of the cores drops to only 0.6 GHz, while the rest remained at 1.2 GHz and 1.5 GHz. The Vivo X100Pro smartphone is equipped with a vapor chamber, but even this cooling system couldn’t tame the Dimensity 9300.

The reason for this occurring points to MediaTek’s decision to use only high-performance cores in the Dimensity 9300. Unlike other SoCs, there’s no configuration of fast and efficient cores here. It remains to be seen how this chip performs in games and daily applications since the CPU Throttling Test pushes the smartphone to its limit.