MediaTek has announced on Weibo when it will reveal its next flagship chipset, and it’s picked an interesting date to do it (via Android Central).
MediaTek’s next mobile processor, expected to be the Dimensity 9500, will make its worldwide debut on September 22 at 2:00 AM ET. If that date sounds familiar, it’s because arch-rival Qualcomm announced yesterday that it would be taking the wraps off its next-generation chip, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, a day later, on September 23.
MediaTek’s next gen chip is almost here
Chosen date is like a thrown gauntlet to Qualcomm
The teaser video posted by MediaTek doesn’t reveal much about what we can expect, with the company not going as far as Qualcomm and naming the processor we can expect to see. But we know an awful lot about the potential Dimensity 9500, thanks to a number of leaks.
According to the latest rumors and whispers, we can expect the Dimensity 9500, or whatever MediaTek’s new flagship chip is called, to be a serious contender. It’s expected to be based on TSMC’s 3nm node architecture, and will repeat the Dimensity 9400’s configuration of eight CPU cores. Those eight cores will comprise a single 4.21GHz core, three 3.5GHz cores, and four 2.7GHz cores.
While that’s not an awful lot to look forward to in terms of direct upgrades, more improvement is expected in the GPU and NPU capabilities, with performance for the latter expected to increase to 100 TOPS.
It’s quite hard not to see MediaTek’s chosen date as a direct challenge to Qualcomm, as it’s clearly not an accident that the latest MediaTek chip will be revealed just before the newest Snapdragon silicon. MediaTek and Qualcomm have been long-time rivals, with the two being the two major players in the processor game.
As a final note, MediaTek has also confirmed it’s begun building on the 2nm node through TSMC’s N2P process architecture. It claims that moving to 2nm chipsets will result in up to 18% better performance and 36% less power consumption when compared to the chips at the same power level and speed. With that in mind, you can expect next year’s Dimensity chip to be a big jump up in performance.
