Note: This article was first published on 23 September 2025.
MediaTek has announced its flagship processor for 2026 Android phones. The timing of the announcement is interesting because the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2025 is happening right now, where the company will launch its new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC.
The new Dimensity 9500 processor is the direct upgrade to last year’s Dimensity 9400. According to the company, users can expect “breakthrough on-device AI, top-tier performance, efficiency, and premium mobile experiences” from devices powered by the new chipset.
Like its predecessor, the Dimensity 9500 SoC continues with an All Big Core design architecture, this time featuring a single ARM C1-Ultra core clocked at 4.21GHz, supported by three C1-Premium cores at 3.5GHz, and four C1-Pro cores at 2.7GHz. According to the company, this octa-core layout delivers 32% faster single-core performance, 17% better multi-core performance, and up to 55% lower peak power consumption from the ultra core. In practice, MediaTek says the chip is 30% more efficient, allowing phones to handle multitasking in apps like games, social platforms, and voice chat more smoothly while also using less energy.
This time around, the Dimensity 9500 keeps the same cache setup for each CPU core as last year, with 2MB of L2 cache for the Ultra core, 1MB for each Premium core, and 512KB for the Pro cores. System-level cache remains at 10MB, but MediaTek has increased the L3 cache from 12MB to 16MB and doubled the L1 cache. These changes contribute to 32% faster single-core performance and a 16% boost in multi-core performance compared to the previous generation.
