After the recent launch of the MediaTek Dimensity 9400+, new details have emerged about MediaTek’s next flagship mobile processor, the Dimensity 9500. The information comes from noted leaker Digital Chat Station, revealing some significant upgrades aimed at pushing performance and efficiency boundaries.
The Dimensity 9500 will be manufactured using TSMC’s next-generation 3nm enhanced process node, known as N3P. It will adopt a full large-core architecture consisting of one Travis core, three Alto cores, and four Gelas cores. Travis and Alto belong to Arm’s next-gen Cortex-X9 series with SME instruction set support, while Gelas is said to be a new performance-oriented A7 series core. The Dimensity 9500 is expected to hit clock speeds exceeding 4 GHz.
MediaTek is also introducing a new GPU with the Dimensity 9500 – the Immortalis-Drage, built with a fresh microarchitecture to boost ray tracing capabilities while lowering power consumption. The chip will feature a hefty 16 MB L3 cache and 10 MB system-level cache (SLC), and it will integrate an upgraded NPU 9.0 that could reach up to 100 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of AI computing power. The SoC will support LPDDR5X RAM at up to 10,667 Mbps and quad-channel UFS 4.1 storage.
Despite earlier plans to move to a 2nm process, MediaTek has reportedly decided to stay with 3nm due to cost concerns and the fact that Apple has locked in much of TSMC’s 2nm production for its A20 Pro chip expected in the 2026 iPhone 18 series. While TSMC’s 2nm node promises better energy efficiency, the N3P process still offers performance gains over the N3E node used in the Dimensity 9400.
The competition between MediaTek and Qualcomm is heating up as both companies are preparing to launch flagship chips built on the same 3nm N3P process. Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 is said to feature a second-generation custom CPU architecture, starting at 4.4 GHz, with its GPU cache bumped from 12 MB to 16 MB. Performance improvements are estimated at around 30%.
According to leaks, both the Dimensity 9500 and Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 could cross the 4 million mark on AnTuTu benchmarks, signaling the start of a new performance era for Android flagships in the second half of 2025. The MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is expected to be officially introduced sometime in Q4 2025.
