5th Generation MediaTek APU

Year-on-year AI performance gains are outstripping CPU and GPU advances, which in turn has helped propel the advances in smartphone hardware – faster and larger resolution displays, increasingly large and complex camera systems, faster always-on connectivity, larger caches, bigger storage, more sensors and features than ever – all while sharing a limited power budget in a mobile device. MediaTek’s 6th Generation APU yet again pushes the limits of what a multicore AI processing unit can do.

MediaTek develops its own Deep Learning Accelerators (Performance Cores), Visual Processing Units (Flexible Cores), hardware-based, multicore scheduler, and software development kits (NeuroPilot) that make up the core components of its industry-leading AI Processing Units (APUs).

The 5^th and 6^th generation MediaTek APU architectures have reconsidered the complete end-to-end pipeline in their design to maximize operational efficiency, ensuring the smartphone will not limit performance during extended use, adversely affect battery life, while also meeting the strict power budgets set by device makers.

This ensures there’s ample power available for the other in-chip processors to work in partnership with the APU, giving device makers greater platform flexibility to develop exciting new applications and features.

Today, smartphone users expect to use their cameras continually, all day, in all conditions, and that requires speed, quality and power-efficiency without compromise. And that’s exactly what we’ve achieved using our 5^th generation APU in the Dimensity 9000: using AI-NR is now over 16x faster in the same power envelope than MFNR used previously. This means even while compute-heavy AI-NR + AI-HDR are active, users can now snap HDR pictures twice as fast as previously and capture 4K HDR videos that are more visually accurate than ever, and enjoys unparalleled power efficiency to extend video recording without the phone heating up.