One big trend in Android in recent years has been positioning self-proclaimed “flagship killer” smartphones at a lower price point by dropping down to a last-gen or step-down chipset. With its new Dimensity 9500s and Dimensity 8500 chipsets, MediaTek is looking to power those devices.
Announced today, the new MediaTek Dimensity 9500s chipset is a 3nm chip that offers a minor step down from the full flagship Dimensity 9500 that launched last year. The chip breaks down into “one Cortex-X925 ultra core with a clock speed of up to 3.73GHz, three Cortex-X4 premium cores, and four Cortex-A720 performance cores.” By comparison, the standard Dimensity 9500 is another “All Big Core” setup, using Arm’s C1-Ultra, C1-Premium, and C1-Pro cores.
Dimensity 9500s further uses an Immortalis-G925 GPU and MediaTek touts that the chip is “optimized for generative reasoning and multi-modal models” – or, in other words, that it’s still plenty powerful for on-device AI tasks.
Meanwhile, MediaTek Dimensity 8500 takes things down one more step with a 4nm process and an “All Big Core” build consisting of eight Cortex-A725 cores. That’s paired with a Mali-G720 GPU.
Both chips should be plenty powerful, just not quite to the same extent as MediaTek’s flagship. MediaTek hasn’t announced any imminent partners for either the Dimensity 9500s nor the Dimensity 8500, but it seems likely they’ll start showing up in Android phones in the months to come.
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