MediaTek unveils flagship Dimensity 9500 with AI and gaming gains

MediaTek unveiled the Dimensity 9500, its next flagship mobile system on chip, pitching the processor as a major step forward for on device artificial intelligence, gaming and power efficiency in premium Android phones. The company said devices using the chip are expected from Vivo and Oppo in the fourth quarter of 2025, initially in Europe, South America and Asia but not the United States.

The Dimensity 9500 continues MediaTek's all big core design and is built on Arm's latest C1 CPU cores. The octa core cluster pairs a single C1Ultra core clocked at 4.21 GHz with three C1Premium cores and four C1Pro cores. MediaTek provided several performance figures, saying single core speeds are roughly 29 to 33 percent higher than the Dimensity 9400 and multicore performance is about 16 to 17 percent higher. The company also highlighted energy gains, claiming the Ultra core can reach peak performance while cutting power draw by as much as 55 percent compared with the prior generation.

Storage and memory architecture were upgraded to four lane UFS 4.1, which MediaTek said doubles sequential read and write bandwidth and speeds loading of large AI models by roughly 40 percent. The chip...