MediaTek announced the Dimensity 9500 with improvements in AI, gaming, and power efficiency.
When you hear about smartphone processors, you’re likely to think of Qualcomm or its Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, which powers the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S25. However, the company with the largest market share in that space is MediaTek, which is known for its Dimensity chips. Now MediaTek has announced a new premium chipset with various improvements that are supposed to help it challenge the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.
For the first time, a MediaTek chipset breaches the 4GHz barrier thanks to the “All Big Core” design of the Dimensity 9500. The chip features the new generation ARM CPU cores, with a single ARM C1-Ultra core clocked at 4.21 GHz, three C1-Premium cores running at 3.5 GHz, and four C1-Pro cores at 2.7 GHz.
With minor improvements to the cache, MediaTek claims 32% faster single-core and 17% faster multi-core performance than last year’s Dimensity 9400. Probably more importantly, the ultra core consumes up to 55% less power at peak performance, and the chipset is 30% more efficient with multitasking. MediaTek doesn’t mention what the power consumption is during less demanding use, but anyone who’s into gaming or other intensive tasks should see that as good news.
Talking about gaming, the chip features an upgraded G1-Ultra GPU with up to 33% better peak performance and 42% improved power efficiency. The bigger upgrade is the doubled ray tracing units, leading to a 119% better ray tracing performance. MediaTek also claims 120fps support in ray tracing, but didn’t mention the games to which that applies.
