MediaTek Boosts Premium Lineup With Kompanio Ultra And Dimensity 9400+

Forbes

11-04-2025

MediaTek has been on a roll recently, hot off its major partnership with Nvidia for the DGX Spark AI chip, which powers the many DGX-based products from Nvidia partners ASUS, Dell and HP. In that partnership, MediaTek contributed its Arm CPU know-how and some other IP to enable Nvidia's most powerful small form factor AI solution.
Continuing the product cadence, this month MediaTek has made a series of announcements, including the new Kompanio Ultra and Dimensity 9400+. These products fill in the more traditional parts of MediaTek's business, which include chips for smartphones and Chromebooks. While MediaTek continues to expand its business into other non-mobile segments, it is still very serious about being competitive in these markets, especially at the high end.
(Note: MediaTek is a client of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.)
The Dimensity 9400+ processor builds on the success of the 9400, which was used in the Vivo X200, Oppo Find X8 and iQoo Neo 10 Pro smartphones. The Dimensity 9400 was announced in October 2024, which means we're ripe for the usual speed bin with the 9400+ after six months. Both processors still use TSMC's 3nm process node, but chip yields always improve with time, and that's how we get the 9400+ today. The 9400+ elevates the same Cortex-X925 Arm core from 3.62 gigahertz up to 3.7 gigahertz; the Cortex-X925 is the cornerstone of the all-big-core design, which also includes three Cortex-X4 cores and four Cortex-A720 cores.
The Dimensity 9400+ also features the same eighth-generation NPU 890, now with Speculative Decoding, which improves agentic performance by 20% compared to the Dimensity 9400. MediaTek has also optimized the 9400+ for DeepSeek's R1 model to allow it to run on-device with support for mixture-of-experts, multi-head latent attention, multi-token prediction and FP8 calculations. These improvements translate to the 20% AI performance boost mentioned above and set the stage for the 9400+ to be used by Chinese OEMs for on-device AI applications.
There are also enhancements to BeiDou satellite support with a 33% improvement in time to first fix, even without a cellular network. There's also enhanced Bluetooth functionality, including direct phone-to-phone connection support of up to 10km in line-of-sight applications, according to MediaTek. The GPU configuration is the same, with no mention of clock speed differences, but there is the addition of a MediaTek Frame Rate Converter 2.0+, which the company says improves power consumption by 40%.
Unsurprisingly, the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ isn't a huge departure from the 9400, but it does provide many minor tweaks to make it more capable for AI, among other things. I would've loved to have seen larger clock speed improvements, but MediaTek has likely squeezed all it can from TSMC's third-gen 3nm process for this architecture. MediaTek says that the first phones powered by the Dimensity 9400+ will be available starting in Q2 2025, with some rumors indicating availability as soon as the end of April.
MediaTek's Kompanio Ultra processor represents an entirely new tier of performance for MediaTek and for Chromebooks. It builds on MediaTek's successes in mobile and compute and creates an entirely new generation of AI-enhanced chips for Chromebooks. The base of this new Ultra-tier chip is an all-big 8-core design built around an Arm v9.2 Cortex-X925 (same cores and clock as the 9400), still using the TSMC 3nm process node. MediaTek claims that it has 18% faster CPU performance, 40% better GPU performance and up to 50% less power consumption versus the Intel Core Ultra 5 125U, not to mention 29% better battery life. This lines up with my experience with Arm-based Chromebook solutions, which goes as far back as a whitepaper I wrote about Chromebooks in 2016.
MediaTek's Kompanio Ultra highlights
MediaTek
The Kompanio Ultra also supports Google Chromebook Plus with Gemini and has room for more AI applications with a 50 TOPS NPU. This is the same MediaTek NPU 890 found in the Dimensity 9400/9400+. This NPU is also nearly 5x faster than the NPU found in Intel's Core Ultra 5 125U, which MediaTek clearly sees as the direct competition in Chromebooks.
Seeing as Google wants Chromebooks to have better AI and on-device performance, it makes sense that MediaTek would build these AI capabilities into the Kompanio Ultra. MediaTek is the undisputed leader in Chromebook processors and has dozens of design wins in the space, including with Acer, ASUS, DynaBook, HP and Lenovo. MediaTek also saw its Chromebook Plus sales in 2024 nearly double its standard Chromebook sales. MediaTek anticipates worldwide Chromebook growth in 2025 to be between 15% and 20%, which bodes well for a platform that enables Chromebook Plus capabilities.
MediaTek continues to win with its flagship smartphone chips and now its flagship Chromebook solution. The sharing of IP across categories is a clear winning strategy for the company, especially in terms of growth opportunities. The use of both the Arm Cortex-X925 CPU cores and MediaTek NPU 890 should also bode well for the company's efforts across multiple markets, even beyond PCs and smartphones.
That said, smartphones and Chromebooks are still very much MediaTek's bread and butter, even as the company seeks to diversify itself beyond those segments. The company must still put out strong products in those categories to stay competitive, and it seems that both Dimensity 9400+ and Kompanio Ultra are already getting recognition from customers and partners. I expect that we'll next hear from MediaTek about the Dimensity 9500 much later this fall, which is when the peak-performance competition will ramp up again.