MediaTek Unveils Dimensity 9500 Mobile Chip With Big AI And Gaming Uplifts
In a strategically timed announcement, MediaTek today unveiled its next-gen flagship system-on-chip (SoC) for mobile devices, the Dimensity 9500 with an all-big-core CPU design and several key upgrades. What makes the timing strategic is that MediaTek opted to announce the part during Day 1 of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit event. It's also the second mobile chip from MediaTek in five months, after having announced the Dimensity 9400+ in April.
Competition is alive and well, folks. We'll go over Qualcomm's announcements separately, but as it applies to MediaTek's newest Dimensity chip, the 9500 comes with the promise of setting "new standards in on-device AI, console-class gaming, and power efficiency" for a new generation of flagship 5G smartphones.
"As AI becomes part of everyday life, consumers want devices that feel smarter, faster, and more
personal without sacrificing battery life," said JC Hsu, corporate senior vice president at MediaTek
and general manager of the Wireless Communications Business Unit. "The MediaTek Dimensity
9500 delivers exactly that: Breakthrough on-device AI, top-tier performance and efficiency, and a
full suite of premium experiences that our partners can bring to users around the world."
Built on TSMC's third-generation 3-nanometer manufacturing process and wielding 30 billion transistors, the Dimensity 9500 is essentially a retooled flagship chip from top to bottom. Starting with the CPU, it sports a primary Arm C1-Ultra core clocked at 4.21GHz, three C1-Premium cores clocked at 3.5GHz, and four C1-Pro cores clocked at 2.7GHz. According to MediaTek, this combination nets 32% higher single-core performance while consuming 37% less power.
Beyond the raw core counts, Dimensity is touting gains from the Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME 2) instruction set, claiming a 57% improvement to object detecting computing performance and a 50% reduction in power consumption for running an encoding-decoding model.
MediaTek is also introducing a new cache memory architecture and four-lane USF 4.1 support, the latter of which delivers a 2x read and write speed boost to accelerate AI model loading by a not-insignificant 40%.
"The
second-generation Dimensity scheduler translates this raw power into smoother responsiveness
and sustained efficiency, even under heavy workloads," MediaTek explains.
For graphics, the Dimensity 9500 features an Arm G1-Ultra GPU with 2x more ray tracing units and a dynamic cache architecture. According to MediaTek, this paves the way for up to 33% higher peak performance and a 42% improvement to power efficiency. Additionally, the GPU introduces double frame rate interpolation up to 120 frames per second.
Also integrated into the design is a 9th generation MediaTek NPU 9900 with Generative AI Engine 2.0. The company says this doubles the compute power of the previous generation while introducing BitNet 1-bit large model processing, for up to a 25% reduction in power consumption.
"The ultra-efficient NPU enables always-on
small models, slashing power consumption by more than 40%. Users benefit from 100% faster 3
billion parameter LLM output, 128K token long text processing, and the industry’s first 4k ultrahigh-resolution image generation," MediaTek says.
A few other notable bits include support for RAW-domain pre-processing, an ISP supporting up to 200MP captures, NPU-assisted focusing, AI-driven Bluetooth call enhancement, 5G connectivity (up to 7.4Gbps via sub-6GHz), and a claimed 20% speed advantage for large Wi-Fi file transfers versus "competitor flagship alternatives."
MediaTek says flagship phones sporting the Dimensity 9500 will arrive in the fourth quarter of this year.
