This is going to be a disaster, isn’t it?
The last half of 2023 is not a great year for chipsets. Apple’s chipset isn’t performing correctly, despite using a more efficient 3nm process, the iPhone 15 Pro heats like hell. Now, even MediaTek has faltered, with the Dimensity 9300 failing the throttling test.
The chipset first debuted on the Vivo X100 series and of course, tipsters got their hands on it. Not even 5 minutes in and it already shows sign of depreciated performance. That’s, in a nutshell, what throttling is. In the CPU Throttling Test app, within the first 15 minutes, the Dimensity 9300 throttled to 46% performance which is a very big and noticeable dip when compared to how it should perform ideally.
Despite the newer 4nm TSMC process, the Dimensity 9300 does not have any efficiency cores, just all performance cores which is sort of confusing, we suppose that MediaTek has found a way to cool it without including these smaller cores. We are, at the back of our minds, expecting a high level of heat because it just lacks the smaller cores to keep it cool and optimized. We’re speculating that MediaTek is relying on a brand’s vapour chamber cooling and hence why decided not to include efficiency cores. VC chambers aren’t enough because the chipset needs to be optimized too.
Also, GSMArena tested the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 as well, as a means to compare. The test unit was a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. Using the same app, the chipset would run 80% of max performance within 10 minutes of throttling.
We have previously used the same CPU Throttling Test app (which is not available in the Play Store by the way) to test out our review units. We’d like to thank our colleagues Hana Kira, Androidist, and Utterly Techie for helping us discover this means of testing performance, aside from your usual benchmarking and real-life testing.
To recall, MediaTek equipped the Dimensity 9300 with a 4+4 architecture consisting of only 4 Cortex-X4 Prime Cores and four Cortex-A720 medium cores. It uses the Arm Immortalis-G720 GPU and also features hardware-based ray tracing and real-time shading. In terms of benchmarks, the chipset is indeed powerful, scoring over 2 million points on AnTuTu, defeating the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. However, benchmarks should not be 100% relied on as optimization, throttling, and heat tests also affect chipset performance and as shown, the Dimensity 9300 is too powerful to be kept alive.
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