MediaTek announces the Dimensity 8450 with minor improvements

MediaTek announced the new Dimensity 8450, a direct successor to the Dimensity 8400 released back in December 2024. As the name implies, the upgrades are minimal, and the company introduced mostly under-the-hood changes. Interestingly, there's already a phone running the silicon - the Oppo Reno14 Pro.

The Dimensity 8450 is still based on TSMC's second-generation 4nm node with an octa-core CPU with 1x Cortex-A725, 3x Cortex-A725 and 4x Arm Cortex-A725 cores. The GPU is Mali-G720 MC7 with 7 cores. If it sounds familiar, that's because the Dimensity 8400 runs on the same exact hardware.

However, the newer chipset boasts gaming and ISP optimizations. The GPU, for instance, now uses the StarSpeed Engine, improving real-world gaming, while the improved ISP has live-stream optimizations. The ISP is capable of handling 320MP sensors with zero-lag HDR imaging. The NPU 880 receives some love too with Agentic AI Engine that allows support for on-device GenAI and LLM workloads.

Lastly, the Dimensity 8450's 5G modem gets a new power-saving feature, UltraSave 3.0+, to reduce energy consumption.

We should start seeing the chip appear in upper mid-range phones in the following weeks and months.

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