MediaTek Dimensity 9500: Big Jumps Across the Board for MediaTek’s Flagship Mobile SoC
Context
MediaTek is a diversified silicon vendor with strong, often leading market position in smart TV, smart speakers, automotive, industrial IoT, ASICs, and Chromebooks. However, it is best known for its mobile processors, and with good reason: MediaTek has claimed to be the #1 smartphone silicon vendor by volume for multiple years. Unfortunately, MediaTek is often ignored by U.S.-centric tech press because Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Galaxy S line have most of the volume in the U.S.; Apple designs its own silicon, and Samsung gets a semi-custom Snapdragon 8 Elites from Qualcomm. Much of the MediaTek silicon that U.S. media does see is in prepaid phones and inexpensive tablets where components are chosen to hit a price point, not provide the best performance.
However, MediaTek is not just a cheap chip vendor. MediaTek is the leading Arm licensee, utilizing Arm’s latest core designs, and MediaTek has its own IP in CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, ISPs, media processing, modems, and more. MediaTek is working with NVIDIA in the datacenter and in its DIGITs AI desktop line. MediaTek’s Kompanio 500 series processors for Chromebooks are merely excellent for the price, but the Kompanio Ultra in Lenovo’s Chromebook Plus 14 provides performance and battery life that rivals Apple Silicon in the MacBook Air. MediaTek also powers Motorola’s highest volume razr folding phone – a best-seller in the U.S.
Starting in 2021, MediaTek launched the Dimensity 9000 series, a mobile SoC aimed at providing the best performance and efficiency without trying to compete primarily on price. It may have been initially picked up by Chinese smartphone vendors who wanted a hedge against their dependency on Qualcomm, but over the past four years, the Dimensity 9000 line’s capabilities have grown, consumers have bought the phones, and sales are up 350% from 2022 – 2025. Of course that’s off of a small base, but MediaTek now says it now has above 40% market share in Chinese brand super-premium phones, so volumes are significant. This growth seems sustainable as Chinese brands like Xiaomi and OPPO are increasingly launching their phones globally – though that still excludes the huge U.S. market.
While MediaTek’s U.S. premium smartphone partners are limited, it is making headway in tablets in the U.S., first with the OnePlus Pad in 2023, and then with Samsung. In 2024, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy Tab S10/S10+/S10 Ultra with the MediaTek Dimensity 9300+. At IFA earlier this month, Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S11/S11 Ultra with the Dimensity 9400+.
Dimensity 9500 Highlights
All the major smartphone silicon vendors are on an annual update cadence targeting fall/holiday launch timetables. Google usually kicks off new Tensor chips in August, Apple in September, and Qualcomm and MediaTek in early October. (Huawei’s HiSilicon output is more erratic for technical and geopolitical reasons.) It’s just an incredibly wild coincidence that MediaTek is announcing its next Dimensity 9000 SoC the same week as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit.
MediaTek summary slide; click to expand
The Dimensity 9500 should be competitive. It is based on TSMC’s 3rd generation 3nm process. Highlights:
This is the third-generation of MediaTek’s All Big Core CPU design. MediaTek’s implementation of the latest Arm cores along with Instruction Set improvements deliver up to 32% higher single-core and 17% higher multi-core performance compared to the previous generation. Single-core improvements are often harder to come by than multi-core, but it’s the single-core performance that consumers will notice most easily on daily use tasks. This huge performance gain does not come at the cost of battery life: the ultra core achieves up to 55% lower power consumption at peak performance, and the system is up to 30% more power efficient while multitasking. MediaTek has improved the cache and memory architecture, so everything is faster, not just raw processing.
GPU performance is also up over 30% with up to 33% higher peak performance and 42% improved power efficiency, and introduces higher frame rate interpolation up to 120FPS raytracing for “console-level quality gaming” that doesn’t actually need those quote marks.
However, the biggest gains are in the NPU, where integer and floating-point computing power has doubled but power consumption is reduced by up to 33% for average and up to 56% for peak loads. MediaTek is also touting an additional “Super Efficient NPU,” claiming it is the first in the industry with a CIM-based NPU for always on processing. In English, this integrated compute-in-memory architecture should allow the phone to run AI continuously in the background for agentic AI.
The Dimensity 9500 features a new ISP for better imaging. The Imagiq 1190 ISP allows for RAW-domain pre-processing, up to 200MP capture, 30fps continuous focus tracking, and 4K 60FPS portrait video. It offers the latest MiraVision Adaptive Display technology for dynamically adjusting contrast and color saturation.
Finally, MediaTek has plenty of updated connectivity for better power consumption, better network edge retention and congestion management thanks to AI, faster 5G with 5CC aggregation, and longer-range Bluetooth. Even if you never use RAW images, your earbuds will remain connected when you leave your phone on the table to grab a coffee.
What’s Next: 2nm
At the (admittedly very minor) risk of Osborning its current generation of mobile SoCs, MediaTek also just announced that it is working with TSMC to be a launch customer of the next-generation 2nm process node in 2026. If yeilds are good, that should drive transistor counts up along with further improving efficiency. MediaTek has always been a leading customer of TSMC’s most advanced nodes, but it usually hasn’t been pushing to be early (that’s typically been Apple in recent years). This further indicates that MediaTek sees continued demand from its customers for leading edge silicon, and that the company is willing to make the investment in dollars and risk to grow its share in those markets going forward.
Press release: MediaTek Develops Chip Utilizing TSMC’s 2nm Process, Achieving Milestones in Performance and Power Efficiency
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