This white paper details the rationale behind MediaTek’s All Big Core architecture, evaluates the results, and discusses the optimized software design necessary to fully capitalize on the unique advantages offered by this groundbreaking SoC.
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The All Big Core architecture debuted by the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 has become a watershed moment in flagship smartphone design. Achieving global critical acclaim for its performance breakthrough, MediaTek is committed to deploying this new architecture on future flagship smartphone platforms.
As part of the first smartphone chip to eschew Arm’s ‘small’ CPU cores, the All Big Core architecture focuses entirely on combining Arm Cortex-X and Cortex-A cores together at optimal clock frequencies to maximize performance and energy efficiency within the limited power availability that a smartphone allows.
The mobile gaming market is projected to achieve a remarkable cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.5% to 2032, and is expected to be the primary driver to computing demand. The trend towards higher display refresh rate, greater gameplay resolution, and more complex in-game visuals necessitates more CPU performance, with popular games like “Genshin Impact” utilizing up to six parallel main threads for CPU-intensive tasks, alongside numerous auxiliary threads.
MediaTek premiered the first tri-gear CPU design with big, medium, and little CPU cores to the smartphone industry in 2017. Soon after, with Arm’s introduction of the Cortex-X CPU series, other brands followed the tri-gear approach in flagship Android smartphones by combining big (Cortex-X), medium (Cortex-A7xx), and little (Cortex-A5xx) together in a single CPU design. MediaTek’s ‘All-Big-Core’ marks another fundamental change in CPU design, away from tri-gear and back to dual-gear for flagship processors, simplifying thread scheduling, and representing the first time Arm Cortex-A5xx ‘little’ processors are no longer used in smartphone designs.
