MediaTek Announces Dimensity 9500s & Dimensity 8500 SoCs For Premium Smartphones

MediaTek has announced two new smartphone chipset focusing on smartphones under flagship-like and premium segment, namely the Dimensity 9500s and Dimensity 8500. The former, as a slightly cut-down version of the Dimensity 9500, effectively competes against Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 5.

Dimensity 9500s & Dimensity 8500

As mentioned, the MediaTek Dimensity 9500s is the little brother of the Dimensity 9500, so it uses the same 3nm process node and an all-big-core CPU architecture that includes 1x Cortex-X925 core at 3.73GHz, plus 3x Cortex-X4 cores and 4x Cortex-A720 cores. For graphics, the chipset features Arm Immortalis-G925 GPU with ray tracing support, while its unspecified NPU model is “optimized for generative reasoning and multi-modal models.” Memory support maxes out at LPDDR5X-10667, and we have seen some smartphones make full use of its bandwidth not too long ago.

The second model announced is the MediaTek Dimensity 8500, built on the slightly older 4nm process, but sticks to the same all-big-core principle as the flagship chipsets, with all of its eight CPU cores powered by Arm Cortex-A725 (split into 1X+3P+4E layout, 3.4GHz max). Here, you’ll find Arm Mali-G720 MC8 GPU and memory support of up to LPDDR5X-9600, and it also notably lacks Wi-Fi 7 support, maxing out at Wi-Fi 6E instead. For matrix and AI compute, it uses MediaTek NPU 880 for these workloads.

At present, MediaTek didn’t say when we’ll see the first wave of smartphones featuring these new chipsets, though we suppose this should mean reasonably soon. Expect these to appear in a premium Chinese-branded smartphone (i.e. Xiaomi, vivo) near you, as they usually are the place where MediaTek chipsets lands on.

Pokdepinion: Decent specs, to say the least.