MediaTek announces two new high-end smartphone chips

MediaTek has announced two new chips for high-end smartphones and tablets: Dimensity 8500 and Dimensity 9500s. Both chips are made for ‘flagship killer' models, and phones based on these chips will start launching in the coming months.

These chips compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 and Samsung's Exynos 2500 in terms of performance.

The Dimensity 8500 is made on TSMC's 4nm process node and features eight Cortex-A725 cores. One of those cores is clocked at 3.4GHz, three clocked at 3.2GHz, and four are clocked at 2.2GHz. The octa-core CPU is paired with the Arm Mali-G720 MC8 GPU, which can drive WQHD+ resolution screens at up to a refresh rate of 144Hz and can play high-end games at high refresh rates (120Hz).

It chip supports quad-channel LPDDR5x RAM and UFS 4.0 storage. Its MediaTek NPU 880 claims to offer on-device AI for features like language translation, image editing, and more. The chip can run 4K 60fps HDR videos.

Its Imagiq 1080 image signal processor (ISP) supports up to 320MP images and can concurrently capture frames from three 32MP cameras with zero shutter lag. The ISP can also record 4K 60fps HDR videos.

The Dimensity 8500 has an integrated 5G modem that supports sub-6GHz networks and offers up to 5.7Gbps download speeds. Other connectivity features include GNSS, Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4, and USB Type-C.

The Dimensity 9500s sits one step below the current flagship MediaTek chip, the Dimensity 9500. You can think of its performance as being similar to the previous-generation flagship chip, the Dimensity 9400+. MediaTek says its new chip offers high-end performance while maintaining good power efficiency.

This new chip is made using TSMC's 3nm process as the Dimensity 9500, but it uses previous-generation Arm CPU cores: one Cortex-X925 clocked at 3.7GHz, three Cortex-X4 cores clocked at 3.3GHz, and four Cortex-A720 cores clocked at 2.4GHz. It supports quad-channel LPDDR5x RAM at 10.67Gbps and UFS 4.0 storage.

It uses the Arm Immortalis-G925 GPU, which can run almost all games at high refresh rates and supports HDR gaming. It can also drive WQHD+ resolution screens at a variable refresh rate of up to 180Hz and supports 4K external screens. Obviously, it supports all forms of HDR and supports up to 8K 60fps video playback with HDR.

Its built-in powerful NPU supports on-device AI processing. Generative reasoning, multimodal AI models, and agentic AI tasks are also supported.

The Imagiq ISP inside the Dimensity 9500s supports up to 320MP cameras and can concurrently process 108MP frames from three cameras with zero shutter lag. It can capture 4K 120fps and 8K 30fps videos with HDR. It even supports 8K 60fps video recording in 8-bit colors and HEVC format.

In terms of connectivity, it has an integrated 5G modem that supports up to 7Gbps download speeds on sub-6GHz networks. Tri-band GPS, Wi-Fi 7 (up to 6.5Gbps), Bluetooth 5.4, NFC, and USB 3.0 Type-C are also supported.