What the Hell Is the ‘Agentic’ AI in the New MediaTek Dimensity Flagship Mobile Chip?

China-based chipmaker MediaTek is teasing what the future of our phones will hold. With its excellent Elmo concept, MediaTek asks, “Can you say the word “agent?” What does that really mean? With its newly announced 3nm chip, the Dimensity 9400, the focus is now on how AI assistants can work in all applications and control your phone.

To break it down, “agent” refers to AI agents. Think of those as multiple AI models working together to complete a task. Imagine entering information into an AI chatbot, telling it to call your mother and wish her a happy birthday on your behalf. Various AI models will create a birthday message, look up your mother’s number in your contacts, and place a call using an AI-generated voice.

Agents are the talk of the town among Silicon Valley’s upper echelons, but the word “agent” can’t get off the concept sheet and into our phones without the underlying technology behind it. The Dimensity 9400 is the first chip to be officially unveiled this year, and it claims to support agents that should power supercharged assistants in our phones. It claims to support 80% better LLM performance than the Dimensity 9300 and double the generation of fine AI art with a neural processor.

Another end of the so-called “Dimensity Agentic AI Engine” is designed to help developers plan the workflow of AI-centric applications. MediaTek says its chips can do about 50 tokens per second for AI calculations. Compare that to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3’s 20 tokens per second, although rumors and leaks suggest that Qualcomm will unveil the Gen 4 later this month. None of the current leaks, like the open ones SmartPrix again WCCFTech, show a comparison between the NPUs of both chips.

The Dimensity 9400 is an “All Big Core” design with one ARM cortex-X925 with a clock speed of 3.62 GHz, and three Cortex-X4 and four Cortex-A720 cores. It should get 35% better single-core and 28% better multi-core performance than the 9300. It supports 100% increase in L2 cache and 50% improvement in L3 cache compared to Dimensity 9300. It also supports 12-core ARM Immortalis-G925 GPU with better ray tracing support.

If not, it’s a new MediaTek chip it supports LPDDR5X memory at 10.7 GBps and should improve power efficiency. Thankfully, it says it supports “triple smartphones,” of which only the Huawei Mate XT is available. competition.

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 now also supports the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra and S10+. But as for other US-based products, the OnePlus Pad 2 avoided the first Dimensity 9000 Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip.

Unless the attitude of US lawmakers towards international chipmakers changes soon (it won’t happen), MediaTek chips will still be rare in US products for our future AI assistants. Google’s Gemini is already rooted in Android, and Apple Intelligence is set to make a complete iOS transition to iPhones in the next few months. The point is, it doesn’t matter what brand you buy; you will hear the word “agent” a lot in 2025 and beyond.

The real question for 2025 is whether agent AI will work as advertised. So far, we’ve seen AI models that are perfectly capable of handling complex tasks, but those are often processed off-device. So far, the AI ​​on the device just provides a sophisticated assistant that can lie to you. The real challenge will be to have this AI that can access all apps and perform tasks without having to call your mom to tell her something you’ll need to apologize for later.