ARM’s Cortex-X930 Might Outpace Apple’s A19, If It Doesn’t Overheat First

ARM’s newest CPU design, the Cortex-X930, is expected to be adopted by MediaTek later this year in the Dimensity 9500 chipset. Now, we’re hearing from leaker Fixed focus digital over on Weibo, that the X930 “super-core CPU) could surpass Apple’s A19 that is expected to be announced with the iPhone 17 series in September.

The Cortex-X930 has not been confirmed to be better in performance or efficiency yet. However, we have heard separate leaks that the Dimensity 9500 would be a 2+6 design, with the two cores being the ARM Cortex-X930 cores. MediaTek has also been testing these performance cores at 4GHz.

It is also reportedly going to support ARM’s SME, or Scalable Matrix Extension. This would help the Dimensity 9500 tackle the more complex workloads more efficiently. This means that the Dimensity 9500 could end up exceeding Apple’s M4 in single-threaded workloads. Which is great, however, Apple is due to announce the M5 very soon.

The Dimensity 9400, the current flagship chipset from MediaTek (technically, the 9400+ is the newest, but it’s mostly just an overclocked version of the 9400), has been great since it launched last year. Unfortunately, we have not seen it in a ton of devices, though, mostly the former BBK brands like vivo, OPPO, and realme.

But the Dimensity 9400 has proven to be very efficient, compared to other flagship chipsets like the Tensor G4, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and the Apple A18 Pro. Hopefully, MediaTek can keep that going for the Dimensity 9500, even though it still won’t be clocked as high as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen ,2 which will be announced in September.

A very exciting time for smartphones is coming up. With some truly insane processor clock speeds coming. The Snapdragon 8 Elite already clocked in at 4.32GHz, and now we’re expecting to see it go past 5GHz with the second generation.