The smartphone chip war is heating up. Qualcomm, a US chip giant, is set to unveil its next flagship chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite, at the Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii from September 23-26, 2025. Not to be outdone, Taiwan’s MediaTek is prepping its own flagship chip, the Dimensity 9500, around the same time.
A recent leak from Digital Chat Station, a Chinese tipster, has revealed the Dimensity 9500’s impressive benchmark scores on Geekbench 6: 3,900 for single-core and 11,000 for multi-core. These numbers blow past the current flagship Dimensity 9400, which scored around 2,900 and 9,200, respectively. The Dimensity 9500 is also closing in on the Snapdragon 8 Elite 2’s scores.
Under the hood
The Dimensity 9500 boasts an upgraded GPU, the Immortalis-Drage, which has been tweaked for better ray tracing performance and reduced power consumption. The chip has also been put through its paces on AnTuTu, where it scored over 4 million points.
According to Digital Chat Station, the Dimensity 9500 is built using TSMC’s N3P 3-nanometer process, which enhances performance and power management. The chip features a big-core architecture with:
- 1 x Travis core based on ARM’s Cortex X9
- 3 x Alto cores based on ARM’s Cortex X9
- 4 x Gelas cores based on ARM’s Cortex A7
The Dimensity 9500 also comes with 16MB and 10MB L3 caches, which improve data transfer to the CPU, and supports LPDDR5X RAM at 10,667 Mbps and UFS 4.1 storage. This means it can handle 8K video recording and multitasking with ease.
Real-world debut
The vivo X300 series is expected to be the first to feature the Dimensity 9500, with a launch planned for September 2025. This is set to be a major showdown between Qualcomm and MediaTek, with consumers waiting to see which flagship chip will come out on top.
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