MediaTek reveals ‘new’ Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 rival, but it shouldn’t have bothered

Over the years, MediaTek’s flagship Dimensity chips have improved enough to put up a tough fight against Qualcomm’s Elite mobile chips. The latest Dimensity 9500 proved to be too close to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in our testing. Now, just a few months after its release, MediaTek is launching a slightly less powerful variant, the Dimensity 9500s, likely geared towards affordable flagships. Along with it, MediaTek has also launched the Dimensity 8500, which might be geared towards the upper mid-range.

Dimensity 9500

The Dimensity 9500s is built on TSMC’s N3E 3nm process, the same as the 9500, and maintains the same CPU architecture with “all big cores.” But instead of deploying Arm’s flagship and the newest C1 cores, the Dimensity 9500s uses older Cortex-X925 at 3.73GHz for the prime core, complemented by three Arm Cortex-X4 cores and four Arm Cortex-A720 cores at undisclosed clock speeds. This configuration is identical to the Dimensity 9400 and 9400 Plus chipsets from MediaTek’s previous lineups.

The Dimensity 9500s also features an Immortalis-G925 GPU from the previous flagship chipset. Meanwhile, it also features an eighth-generation NPU, most likely the NPU 890, to run on-device generative AI apps. The built-in Imagiq ISP enables 8K video recording with Dolby Vision and focus tracking at up to 30fps. It also supports recording at up to 8K 60fps.

MediaTek’s strategy appears to be inspired by Qualcomm’s recent launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 (non-Elite), which is tied to a flagship identity while offering slightly less demanding specifications. This could also allow phone makers to market new devices as top performers while saving some component costs, offsetting the pressure from increasing memory and storage prices.

Dimensity 8500

The Dimensity 8500 also features the CPU and GPU identical to those of the older Dimensity 8400 and 8450. Its CPU packs eight Arm Cortex-A725 cores with a peak frequency of 3.4GHz — up from 3.25GHz. It also repeats the Mali-720G GPU but with increased performance.

It is also built on TSMC’s 4nm process, which is the same as the Dimensity 8400 and 8450. But with higher CPU and GPU frequencies, MediaTek claims the Dimensity 8500 offers a 25% performance boost and a 20% improvement in power efficiency.

In addition, the Dimensity 8500 also supports better AI-enhanced telephoto photography and gaming features, such as frame stabilization in more titles.

While the Dimensity 8500 already powers the Honor 200, which was launched in China earlier this year, the Dimensity 9500s is speculated to power an upcoming Redmi Turbo 5 series phone in China. There’s little information about the global availability of devices with these chips.