MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro is its first 2nm chip with next-gen Arm cores and major AI upgrades

MediaTek has announced the Dimensity 9600 Pro, its new flagship smartphone chipset and the company’s first processor built on a 2nm process. It also marks the debut of Arm’s next-generation C2 CPU cores and Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU in a MediaTek chip.

The company is focusing heavily on performance and AI with the new chipset. It also brings faster storage, support for the newer LPDDR6 memory standard and several upgrades for gaming, cameras and on-device generative AI.

The Dimensity 9600 Pro uses an eight-core CPU with a different configuration from the Dimensity 9500. It has two Arm C2-Ultra cores, three C2-Pro cores with 1MB of L2 cache and another three C2-Pro cores with 512KB of L2 cache.

This gives the chip two Ultra-class cores instead of the single Ultra core used by the Dimensity 9500. MediaTek claims the new CPU delivers 17% higher single-core performance while improving efficiency by 37%. Multi-core performance is up by 15%, while efficiency improves by a much larger 61%.

MediaTek has not revealed the clock speeds yet, so real-world performance will depend on how smartphone makers tune the chipset.

The chip also has 16MB of L3 cache and 10MB of system-level cache.

Graphics performance gets a major upgrade with the new Arm Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU. MediaTek claims up to 27% higher peak GPU performance compared to the previous generation, while ray tracing performance improves by 18%. GPU power efficiency is also up by 24%.

The GPU supports gaming at more than 185fps and uses neural graphics rendering to improve image quality through techniques such as super resolution.

This should make the Dimensity 9600 Pro particularly interesting for gaming phones and other flagship devices with high-refresh-rate displays.

AI is one of the biggest areas of improvement. The Dimensity 9600 Pro comes with MediaTek’s NPU 1090, which offers twice the INT4 performance of the NPU 990 used in the Dimensity 9500.

MediaTek also claims 55% better token generation per watt and 51% faster pre-fill performance. The latter is important for generative AI because it improves how quickly the chip processes the user’s prompt before generating a response.

There is also a hardware compression engine for the KV cache, which should help reduce memory usage during AI workloads.

MediaTek is positioning the NPU for both generative AI and agentic AI applications, rather than limiting it to basic AI features found in smartphone cameras and system apps.

The Dimensity 9600 Pro is also one of the first smartphone platforms to support LPDDR6 memory. It supports both LPDDR5X and LPDDR6 at up to 10,667Mbps. LPDDR6 can offer higher performance, although it is also expected to increase the cost of flagship devices.

Storage support has also moved from UFS 4.1 on the Dimensity 9500 to UFS 5.0.

This combination should help reduce bottlenecks when phones are handling large games, AI models and other demanding workloads.

The new chipset supports camera sensors up to 200 megapixels and can record video at up to 8K resolution at 60fps. It also supports 4K video at 120fps with electronic image stabilisation and 4K at 240fps for slow-motion recording.

One notable change is that the ISP can work directly with the NPU for image and video processing. This can allow AI-based processing to happen more closely within the camera pipeline.

The video decoder also adds support for VVC, also known as H.266, alongside HEVC, AVC, VP9 and AV1.

The Dimensity 9600 Pro retains Wi-Fi 7 support with tri-band connectivity and speeds of up to 7.3Gbps. Bluetooth support has also been upgraded to Bluetooth 6.2.

For displays, the chipset supports resolutions up to WQHD+ at 180Hz. MediaTek also lists support for tri-port MIPI, which is particularly relevant for devices with more complex display configurations such as tri-fold phones.

On the cellular side, it uses a 3GPP Release 17 modem with sub-6GHz 5G support and carrier aggregation.

The first smartphone powered by the Dimensity 9600 Pro has already been announced, with more devices expected to follow. MediaTek has not confirmed whether a standard Dimensity 9600 will also be launched.