If the South Korean phone maker was only there for the snacks, we’d be shocked. More likely, it’s eyeing up the new silicon as a potential stopgap between its hopelessly underpowered Exynos 1580 and the overengineered Exynos 2400e.

Specs-wise, the Dimensity 8450 sticks with the same CPU layout as its predecessor. It is a cocktail of Cortex-A725 cores with varying L2 cache sizes. It’s one of the rare chipsets these days that skips the usual little cores entirely, packing only ‘big’ CPUs. The GPU is still the ARM Mali-G720 MC7.

The only thing new are a handful of backend tweaks. MediaTek has added what it calls a StartSpeed Engine for better gaming grunt and improved its ISP to boost livestreaming image quality. These are the sort of upgrades that look nice on a slide deck but won’t blow anyone’s socks off in the real world.

Despite the incremental changes, the 8450 now looks like a solid upper mid-range chip. It easily beats Samsung’s  Exynos 1580, which struggles to power even mid-tier devices without wheezing. No surprise then that Samsung might tap MediaTek for phones or tablets sitting in that performance no-man’s-land.

There is no official word from Samsung on what devices might get this chip, but Oppo has already slapped it into the Reno14 Pro, which is already out in the wild. If Samsung’s smart, it’ll do the same before the Exynos division embarrasses it further.