MediaTek’s latest flagship SoC platform firmly brings the company into the era of AI with the latest cores from Arm. Arm just recently announced its new high-performance CPU cores and neural-accelerated GPU cores. Unsurprisingly, you can find those cores in MediaTek’s latest Dimensity 9600 Pro chip. The Dimensity 9600 Pro represents a continuation of MediaTek’s strategy to build a high-performance all-big-core CPU that leverages the latest CPU IP from Arm. This SoC, if it is anything like its predecessor, the Dimensity 9500, will find its way into many Chinese flagship phones. MediaTek has yet to break into the high-end of the US market, but it did win the Oppo Find X9 Pro, which is definitely a flagship phone with an incredible camera and great battery life.
The Dimensity 9600 Pro Has Great Specs on Paper
The new eight-core CPU with two brand new C2-Ultra CPU cores paired with pairs of three-core C2-Pro running at different frequencies. The fastest cores, the C2-Ultra cores, run at 4.55 GHz while the C2-Pro cores run at 4.35 and 3.1 GHz, respectively. According to MediaTek, this results in a 17% increase in single-threaded performance and a 15% increase in multi-threaded performance. These cores also share a common 16MB L3 cache, allowing more workloads to stay on the CPU and reducing power and latency.
For memory, the Dimensity 9600 Pro is among the first industry to support both LPDDR6 and UFS 5 for memory and storage. This results in up to 33% better memory performance than DDR5X and 100% better storage performance than 2-channel UFS 4, according to MediaTek. Higher memory bandwidth will translate to better on-device AI performance and reduce dependence on the cloud. Especially in China, where developers prefer to run things locally and agentic operating systems are much more commonplace.
One of the Dimensity 9600 Pro’s most interesting features is its all-new Mali G2 Ultra NX GPU from Arm. This is Arm’s first GPU capable of Neural performance and offers significantly better AI acceleration and ray tracing capabilities. It’s also significantly faster than the last generation GPU on the Dimensity 9500, with MediaTek claiming as much as a 27% leap in 3Dmark Steel Nomad Light. With the power of neural graphics, MediaTek can upscale games, resulting in less heat and better performance lol. MediaTek manufactures this bleeding-edge SoC with TSMC’s latest 2nm process node, the same as Apple’s A20 Pro.
The 9600 Pro Is Already In Oppo’s Flagship Phone
Oppo’s Pete Lau announced online that the new OPPO Find X10 Pro Max will launch globally using MediaTek’s Dimensity 9600 Pro SoC. He also added that this new phone would use OPPO’s Laminar Flow Engine at its core alongside the SoC. I’m excited to see that this is a global launch, because while it doesn’t mean it will probably launch in the US, it does mean it will launch in Europe and could give MediaTek a global opportunity for flagship growth. We still have to wait to see whether other OEMs adopt the Dimensity 9600 Pro, but I expect we’ll see many of the usual suspects from MediaTek’s partners in China. I believe that will include Xiaomi, Vivo, iQoo, and possibly even Honor.
While there aren’t any official benchmarks, I expect to see fierce competition among MediaTek, Apple, and Qualcomm when devices become available. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit is next week, and we should have a better idea of how the competition will line up this fall. But even then, nothing is set in stone until devices become commercially available and people have review units in hand for testing. I was very impressed by last year’s OPPO Find X9 Pro, so I expect only an improvement over last year’s model, with an even more powerful and efficient SoC.
