MediaTek Dimensity 9500: Next-Gen Chipset with Enhanced AI and Ray Tracing Capabilities

MediaTek Dimensity 9500 SoC May Offer Better Ray Tracing, AI Performance

The chipset may be equipped with Arm's latest Cortex-X9 series cores Dimensity 9500 SoC is rumoured to be in development as the latest flagship-tier smartphone processor from MediaTek. Ahead of its anticipated debut sometime later this year, a tipster suggests that it could be fabricated using TSMC's N3P process (3nm). Powered by Arm's latest Cortex-X9 series cores, the chipset is speculated to bring improvements related to ray tracing and artificial intelligence (AI) -- the latter supported by a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of delivering 100 tera operations per second (TOPS) performance. Tipster Digital Chat Station (translated from Chinese) leaked specifications of the purported MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chipset in a post on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo. Fabricated using the N3P process, the SoC is tipped to come with an octa-core architecture, though its makeup could be different compared to what previous rumours suggested. Instead of having a 2 + 6 configuration, the Dimensity 9500 chipset may have one Cortex-X930 prime cores dubbed "Travis", three cores dubbed "Alto", and four Cortex-A730 "Gelas" cores. The SoC is said to be complemented by an Immortalis-Drage GPU which could offer improvements in terms of ray tracing and AI, while also reducing the power consumption, courtesy of a new GPU microarchitecture. Meanwhile, an NPU 9.0 is tipped to deliver 100 TOPS of AI performance. As per the tipster, the Dimensity 9500 chipset will have 16MB of L3 cache and 10MB of SLC cache. Touted to be a flagship offering, it may support devices equipped with up to LPDDR5X RAM and up to UFS 4.1 storage. Past reports suggest that the N3P process used by TSMC for the purported chipset's fabrication could result in a 5 percent performance gain and a 5-10 percent efficiency improvement as compared to the current Dimensity 9400 SoC which is built using the N3E process. It may also benefit from improved multi-thread performance with the use of Arm's Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) which can accelerate AI and ML-based applications and provide enhanced support for matrix operations. Although no official details are known regarding the launch timeline of the Dimensity 9500 SoC, its predecessor was announced in October 2024, and the purported chip could also launch around the same time this year.

MediaTek Dimensity 9500 details surface, 100TOPS NPU?

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. 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. 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. 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.