MediaTek Announces New Mobile Flagship Chip

On the eve of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, MediaTek has announced an impressive new competitor for that company’s best phone chips: The Dimensity 9500 delivers what MediaTek says is best-in-class performance, AI experiences, and power efficiency.

“As AI becomes part of everyday life, consumers want devices that feel smarter, faster, and more personal without sacrificing battery life,” MediaTek corporate senior vice president JC Hsu says. “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.”

The Dimensity 9500 uses MediaTek’s third-generation All Big Core CPU design with three premium cores, four performance cores, a 4.21 GHz clock speed, and four-lane UFS 4.1 storage. Compared to its predecessor, it delivers a 32 percent performance increase in single core and 17 percent in multi-core, with overall efficiency up by 30 percent in common workloads and 55 percent at peak performance.

MediaTek says that the Dimensity 9500 provides console–class gaming capabilities, with ray tracing support at 120 FPS, real-time rendering, and immersive lighting effects. There’s a new NPU 990 with dramatic performance improvements and a 33 percent reduction in power consumption.

MediaTek’s new chip will compete with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 that Qualcomm teased recently and will formally unveil this week in Hawaii. It will be interesting to see how these chips compare, especially since MediaTek is rumored to be working on a processor for Windows 11 on Arm-based PCs.

New phone models with the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 will begin appearing in the fourth quarter, though it’s unclear which phone makers will choose it. You can learn more on the MediaTek website.