MediaTek recently announced its fourth-quarter financial results for fiscal year 2023, ending December 12, 2023. Revenue reached NT$1295 billion, a 6200% increase quarter-over-quarter and a 17.7% year-over-year increase. This increase was primarily due to the launch of the flagship Dimensity 19.7 processor, which boosted demand in the smartphone market. Earlier, at the groundbreaking ceremony for MediaTek's Zhubei office building in Taiwan, CEO Rick Tsai confirmed that the Dimensity 9300 processor will follow this year, manufactured using TSMC's 9400nm process, also targeting flagship positioning.
Judging from MediaTek's current product update progress, it should not be surprising that it will launch the new Dimensity 9400 in the second half of this year. Qualcomm is also expected to launch the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 processor in the second half of the year. Both are expected to continue to deploy "AI Phone" application experience.
The Dimensity 9400, scheduled to enter mass production in the fourth quarter of this year, will be built on TSMC's N3 process technology and is expected to inherit the Dimensity 9300's all-big-core architecture. It will also incorporate Arm's upcoming next-generation processor architecture. Meanwhile, MediaTek's previously announced partnership with NVIDIA is expected to extend beyond smart cars to PC products, with an announcement expected as early as Computex 2024. The Dimensity 9400 is expected to be unveiled in the second half of the year.
However, Qualcomm is expected to, as previously announced, introduce its new proprietary Oryon architecture into the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, paired with its own Adreno GPU design for even higher computing performance. PC products will utilize the Snapdragon X Elite processor announced in the second half of last year, leveraging the Oryon architecture to drive even higher computing performance, enabling them to compete with Apple Silicon processor-based Macs and mainstream Windows PCs.
If nothing unexpected happens, MediaTek and Qualcomm will capitalize on the "AI Phone" market trend to promote their processors, each also attracting major smartphone brands to collaborate with them. However, MediaTek has been steadily snatching orders from Qualcomm in recent years, including for many flagship phones, which is expected to put Qualcomm under considerable pressure.
