MediaTek Dimensity 9400+ was introduced earlier this month, now the details about the upcoming flagship Dimensity 9500 processor has surfaced, thanks to leaker Digital Chat Station.
The Dimensity 9500 will be built using TSMC’s new generation 3nm enhanced process N3P, using all-large core architecture, including 1 x Travis+3 x Alto+4 x Gelas. Among them, Travis and Alto are Arm’s new generation X9 series large cores, supporting the SME instruction set, and Gelas is the new A7 series large core.
In addition, the Dimensity 9500 will integrate the Immortalis-Drage GPU with a new microarchitecture to improve ray tracing performance and reduce power consumption, and support full AI; it has 16MB of L3 cache, 10MB SLC, upgraded NPU 9.0, and is expected to provide 100TOPS computing power. It will also support, 10667Mbps LPDDR5x RAM + quad-channel UFS 4.1 storage.
Why still 3nm instead of moving to 2nm?
Even though earlier reports said that MediaTek originally planned to use TSMC’s 2nm process instead of 3nm, it dropped the plans considering the high price for the process and Apple locking the production for their A20 Pro chip in 2026 for the iPhone 18 series.
Although the energy efficiency of N3P may not be as good as TSMC’s new generation 2nm process node, it is still an improvement over the N3E used in Dimensity 9400. In addition, the maximum frequency of Dimensity 9500 is expected to be over 4GHz.
Qualcomm vs MediaTek flagships
In addition, the tipster emphasized that the flagship chip war between Qualcomm and MediaTek has entered a hot stage. Both the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 and Dimensity 9500 chips are manufactured using the same TSMC’s N3P process and are designed with a full large-core architecture. The AnTuTu score will be over 4 million points, which means that the next-generation Android flagships released in the second half of the year will enter the 4 million era.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite 2
Earlier reports revealed that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 is expected to start at 4.4GHz clock speed, and adopt second-generation self-developed CPU architecture. The GPU independent cache is said to increase from 12MB to 16MB, and the performance is expected to improve by about 30%.
As usual, the MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is expected to be introduced sometime in Q4, 2025.