China-based chipmaker MediaTek is being explicit about what the future of our phones will entail. In its best Elmo impression, MediaTek asks: “Can you say the word “agent”? What exactly does that mean? For its recently announced 3nm flagship chip, the Dimensity 9400, the focus is now on how Elmo assistants AI can work in all apps and even control your phone for you.
To break it down, “agent” refers to AI agents. Think of them as multiple AI models working together to complete a task. Imagine you put a message into an AI chatbot, telling it to call your mother and wish her a happy birthday on your behalf. Several AI models will create the birthday message, search your contacts for your mother’s number, and then make the call using an AI-generated voice.
Agents are a buzzword among the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, but the term “agent” can’t jump from the concept sheet to our phones without the underlying technology behind it. The Dimensity 9400 is just the first chip officially revealed this year and claims it can support the agents that are supposed to power the supercharged assistants in our phones. It claims to support 80% better LLM performance than the Dimensity 9300 and two times better AI art generation with a new neural processor.
The other extreme is the so-called “Dimensity Agentic AI Engine” which is designed to help developers establish a working path for various AI-centric applications. MediaTek claims its chips can generate around 50 tokens per second for AI calculation. Compare that to the 20 tokens per second of the current Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, although rumors and leaks suggest Qualcomm will reveal Gen 4 later this month. None of the current leaks, such as those from smart award and WCCFTech, shows comparisons between the NPUs of both chips.
The Dimensity 9400 is an “All Big Core” design with a single ARM Cortex-X925 clocked at 3.62 GHz, along with three Cortex-X4 and four Cortex-A720 cores. It is supposed to offer 35% better single-core performance and 28% better multi-core performance than the 9300. Supports 100% increase in L2 cache and 50% improvement in L3 cache compared with the Dimensity 9300. It also supports a 12-core ARM Immortalis-G925 GPU with better ray tracing support.
Otherwise, the new MediaTek chip It supports LPDDR5X memory at 10.7 GBps and is supposed to improve power efficiency. Interestingly, it claims to support “triple smartphones”, of which there is currently only the Huawei Mate XT. to deal with.
For the most part, the Dimensity 9300 and 9300+ were tied to brands you won’t find in the US, like Vivo, Oppo, and Redmi. As revealed last month, that CPU is now also supported by the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra and S10+.. But as for other US-based products, the OnePlus Pad 2 eschewed the original’s Dimensity 9000 chip for the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Unless U.S. lawmakers’ attitude toward international chipmakers changes soon (it won’t), MediaTek chips will remain relatively rare for products in the U.S. But that belies how all chipmakers, Not just those in the US, they are fine-tuning their chips for our upcoming AI assistants. Google’s Gemini is already putting down roots on Android, and Apple Intelligence is set to do a complete iOS overhaul on iPhones in the coming months. The thing is, it doesn’t matter what brand you buy; In 2025 and beyond, you will hear the word “agent” a lot more.
The real question for 2025 is whether agent AI will work as advertised. So far, we’ve seen AI models perfectly capable of handling intense tasks, but they are often processed off-device. Until now, on-device AI simply offers a more complicated assistant gadget that is capable of lying to you. The real challenge will be having this AI able to access apps and perform tasks without calling your mom to tell her something you’ll have to apologize for later.