MediaTek unveils Dimensity 9500 day before Qualcomm summit
MediaTek announced its Dimensity 9500 mobile platform on September 22 at its Hsinchu, Taiwan headquarters. The company scheduled the launch one day before Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit, where Qualcomm plans to reveal its competing Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor from September 23-25.
The Dimensity 9500 uses a new CPU design with eight cores: one ultra core running at 4.21GHz, three premium cores, and four performance cores. MediaTek reports the processor delivers 32% faster single-core performance and 17% faster multi-core performance compared to its previous generation. The ultra core also uses 55% less power at peak performance.
The chip includes MediaTek's ninth-generation NPU 990 with Generative AI Engine 2.0 for artificial intelligence tasks. The company states the AI processor runs 3-billion-parameter language models twice as fast as before and handles text sequences up to 128,000 tokens. It can generate 4K images directly on the device while using 56% less peak power.
Graphics processing comes from an Arm G1-Ultra GPU that MediaTek says performs 33% better and uses 42% less power than the previous version. The GPU supports ray tracing at frame rates up to 120 frames per second.
The platform supports 200-megapixel camera sensors and can record 4K portrait videos at 60 frames per second. MediaTek added continuous autofocus tracking at 30 frames per second for video recording.
Storage connectivity includes four-lane UFS 4.1 support, which MediaTek claims doubles read and write speeds and reduces large AI model loading times by 40%. The processor also features 5G connectivity with five-carrier aggregation.
Phone manufacturers plan to release devices with the Dimensity 9500 in the fourth quarter of 2025. JC Hsu, MediaTek's corporate senior vice president, said the processor aims to provide AI features without reducing battery life.
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