The chipset is arguably the most important part of any phone. It’s fundamental for the performance of the device, but also increasingly relied on for AI capabilities.
If you’re choosing a flagship Android phone or tablet in 2026, you’ll have two main options. Qualcomm’s rebranded Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 might be the obvious one, but ignore MediaTek at your peril.
The latter’s new Dimensity 9500 is a very strong choice on paper, delivering several key upgrades that might even give it the upper hand this time around. Here are the key details that you need to know.
A big performance boost
The Dimensity 9500 is sticking with TSMC’s 3nm process – the same as Google’s new Tensor G5 in the Pixel 10 phones – while moving to a third generation of its ‘All Big Core’ CPU design.
It consists of an ultra core that can hit clock speeds of up to 4.21GHz, plus three premium cores and four performance cores.
MediaTek claims this will yield up to 32% more single-core and 17 percent better multi-core performance than last year’s Dimensity 9400.
It’s not clear which scenarios will give you the biggest boost, though MediaTek says that the Dimensity 9500 enables “console-class gaming”.
Martyn Casserly
The chip features an Arm G1-Ultra GPU, plus support for ray tracing at 120fps and real-time rendering and “immersive lighting effects” via the Unreal Engine.
Crucially, power efficiency hasn’t been forgotten about. MediaTek says there’s a gen-on-gen improvement of up to 42% here, which should help to offset the extra power demands of the performance upgrades and help enable strong battery life.
Multitasking in games and social call apps are specifically mentioned.
However, will this really ensure you get a gaming experience that’s on par with a PS5 or Xbox Series X? For many people, it’s the quality of the games available on the Play Store and not performance that will determine this.
AI, AI, AI
As you can imagine, artificial intelligence has played a huge role in the development of the Dimensity 9500.
The chipset includes MediaTek’s new NPU 990, which has the Generative AI Engine 2.0 built in. The company claims it helps double the speed of output on LLMs (Large Language Models) with 3 billion parameters, while reducing loading speeds by 40 percent.
Anyron Copeman / Foundry
But MediaTek has also recognised the significant environmental impact of AI, claiming it has reduced peak power consumption for large AI models by 40%. There’s also a big emphasis on on-device AI processing, which doesn’t rely on internet-based cloud infrastructure and is generally considered more secure.
But which devices will it power?
MediaTek’s press release for the Dimensity 9500 launch is awash with big performance, power efficiency and AI claims. It remains to be seen whether these stand up to scrutiny, plus how much of a difference this makes to the end user.
However, we already know that the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 will power the Xiaomi 17 series, with the likes of the OnePlus 15, Honor Magic 8 series and Samsung Galaxy S26 series all expected to be among the early adopters.
No such reveals have taken place for the Dimensity 9500 yet, with MediaTek simply stating that the first devices “are expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2025”.
If the Dimensity 9400 is anything to go by, this will be dominated by Chinese manufacturers such as Oppo, Vivo and Realme. On the tablet side, the Galaxy Tab S12 series is also possible next year.
Regardless, the Dimensity 9500 looks like an exciting step forward, with MediaTek really taking the fight to Qualcomm. However, look out for a response from the latter very soon.
