MediaTek’s next flagship chip is also its first on a 2nm process. The Dimensity 9600 Pro was unveiled in Hsinchu on September 15, 2026. It is the first chipset built on Arm’s new C2 CPU cores and the Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU, and much of the work went into on-device AI.
CPU with no small cores
MediaTek sticks with its “All Big Core” approach but changes the mix. The Dimensity 9600 Pro has two Ultra-class cores and gives up one smaller Pro core to make room. The 2+3+3 layout looks like this:
- 2x Arm C2-Ultra at 4.55GHz
- 3x Arm C2-Pro at 4.35GHz
- 3x Arm C2-Pro at 3.1GHz
The company claims 17% higher single-core and 15% higher multi-core performance compared with the Dimensity 9500. The efficiency gains are bigger: single-core efficiency is 37% better, and multi-core power consumption drops by 61%. The chip has 16MB of L3 cache and 34.5MB of cache in total.
Graphics built for high frame rates
The Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU delivers 27% higher peak performance and 18% faster ray tracing, and it uses 24% less power at peak. MediaTek says it supports gaming at up to 185fps. Neural graphics rendering is meant to make super resolution look better, which matters when a game renders at a lower resolution and upscales to the display.
Memory, storage and AI
The Dimensity 9600 Pro is the first mobile chip to support both LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.0 storage. It also works with LPDDR5X. LPDDR6 is 33% faster than LPDDR5X, though it also costs more, so phone makers will have to choose.
The MediaTek NPU 1090 has twice the INT4 performance of the NPU 990 in the Dimensity 9500. It generates 55% more tokens per watt and handles prefill, the step where a model reads the prompt, 51% faster. A hardware compression engine for the KV cache helps with long conversations. According to MediaTek’s press release, the chip can run models with up to 30B parameters, and a separate low-power NPU cuts consumption by 40% for always-on AI features.
Camera and video
The image signal processor can use the NPU directly for photo and video processing. It supports camera sensors of up to 200MP, video recording at up to 8K at 60fps and 4K240 slow motion. The video decoder adds VVC (H.266). MediaTek’s spec sheet also lists support for WQHD+ displays at up to 180Hz, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.2.
When to expect phones
MediaTek says the first phones with the Dimensity 9600 Pro and the related Dimensity 9600M should launch in the same quarter the chip was announced. Vivo has confirmed that its X500 Pro Max will be the first phone to use the new chip. MediaTek has not said whether a standard Dimensity 9600 is coming.
