MediaTek’s first 2nm chips are official, up to 61% lower power consumption and much more AI capabilities

MediaTek has officially unveiled its new high-end smartphone processors, the Dimensity 9600 Pro and the smaller model 9600M.

The main novelty lies in the 2 nm manufacturing process, developed in collaboration with the company TSMC, a technology that guarantees superior performance and significantly improved energy efficiency.

These new hardware components are designed to handle advanced gaming and on-device artificial intelligence functions, preparing to challenge competitors such as Apple’s A20 Pro chip and the future Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.

The first smartphones equipped with this technology will hit the market by the end of this year.

MediaTek presents Dimensity 9600 Pro and Dimensity 9600M: all the news

The Dimensity 9600 Pro adopts a CPU design defined as All Big Core, which eliminates the classic low-power cores in favor of exclusively high-performance cores. The 8-core configuration includes 2 C2 Ultra cores reaching a frequency of 4.55 GHz, paired with 3 C2 Pro cores up to 4.35 GHz and another 3 C2 Pro cores set at 3.1 GHz.

Compared to the previous generation, represented by the Dimensity 9500, this model offers a 17% performance increase in single-core and 15% in multi-core. The most notable data regards consumption, which records a 61% reduction in multi-core operations and 37% in single-core operations.

To support this computing power, MediaTek has for the first time integrated on a smartphone chip support for LPDDR6 RAM, which increases bandwidth by 33%, and for storage UFS 5.0, capable of doubling read and write speeds.

Artificial Intelligence and Gaming

A particular focus has been given to artificial intelligence, managed by a dual architecture consisting of the powerful NPU 1090 and the more economical eNPU 2.0. The processor is capable of supporting LLMs up to 30 billion parameters directly on the smartphone, enabling the execution of complex tasks without having to rely continually on cloud servers.

Energy efficiency for always-on artificial intelligence functions improves by 40%, facilitating the use of proactive and personalized digital assistants.

Even the gaming sector gets significant updates thanks to the new GPU G2-Ultra NX. Peak graphics performance increases by 27%, while the power draw in this phase falls by 24%. In addition, the ray tracing-related graphics processing speed is 18% higher.

Photography, Video and Connectivity

For multimedia management, the new Imagiq 1290 ISP introduces highly advanced photography and video features. Future devices will be able to record 4K video at 240 fps to achieve extremely smooth slow-motion sequences, in addition to supporting 4K at 120 fps in Log.

The photographic dynamic range reaches up to 17 stops. At the level of mobile networks, the chip integrates a 5G-Advanced modem capable of reaching download speeds of 7.4 Gbit/s. The technological package also includes support for Bluetooth 6.2, a position-tracking system 30% more precise, and hardware decoding for the H.266 video format.

MediaTek has not yet announced which will be the very first smartphones to mount the Dimensity 9600 series, but the launch is expected in the current quarter.