MediaTek held a product event on September 15, officially unveiling its flagship Dimensity 9600 series SoC. Positioned for the new era of AI smartphones, the Dimensity 9600 PRO is the first to adopt TSMC's 2nm process, developed in close partnership with the foundry to fully exploit the performance and efficiency potential of this advanced node.
Dimensity 9600 PRO delivers significant gains in performance and efficiency
On the CPU side, the Dimensity 9600 PRO pairs two 4.55GHz C2-Ultra super cores (2MB L2 cache) with three 4.35GHz C2 PRO large cores (1MB L2 cache) and three 3.10GHz C2 PRO large cores (512KB L2 cache), backed by 16MB of L3 cache for a total of 34.5MB across the die. Compared with its predecessor, single-core performance is up 17% and multi-core performance up 15%, while super-core power consumption drops 37% and multi-core power consumption drops 61%.
For memory and storage, the new platform supports LPDDR6 RAM, delivering a 33% performance uplift, along with UFS 5.0 flash storage that doubles the throughput of dual-channel UFS 4.0.
Beneath the process node, the Dimensity 9600 PRO introduces a "fusion computing architecture" that forms an AI-native design. The architecture weaves together heterogeneous compute elements such as the CPU, GPU, NPU and ISP at both hardware and software levels, with AI serving as the central engine to build a unified compute fabric and redefine the smartphone agent experience. MediaTek argues that siloed compute is a thing of the past, and that heterogeneous collaboration is the future of AI smartphones.
Dimensity 9600 PRO marks a breakthrough in AI compute and graphics performance
On the AI compute side, the Dimensity 9600 PRO adopts a dual-NPU architecture featuring the APU 1090 high-performance AI processor, with INT4 throughput doubled, peak performance up 51% and tokens per watt improved by 32%. It is paired with an ultra-efficient NPU that enables always-on sensing at lower power, cutting consumption by 40%, and supports the latest large-model compression techniques along with on-device acceleration of MoE large models. The Dimensity Agent AI Engine 3.0 brings the Dimensity Sensing Foundation suite and the Dimensity AI development kit, mapping respectively to small-core and large-core compute to enable efficient on-device agent execution, while AISeal safeguards user privacy.
On the graphics front, the Dimensity 9600 PRO uses a 12-core Mali G2 Ultra NX GPU paired with a third-generation ray tracing engine. It is the first to implement Ray Tracing Pipeline (RTP) technology, Dimensity hardware OMM ray tracing, the Dimensity neural rendering architecture (Dimensity DLSS) and Dimensity Frame Boost 4.0. GPU peak performance is up 27% with power consumption down 24%, and it scores 3029 on 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme, an 18% improvement.
In gaming scenarios, Delta Force is the first mobile title to deploy RTP, delivering PC-grade visuals; Arena Breakout supports console-grade hardware OMM ray tracing; Honor of Kings uses neural rendering to upscale from 720P to 1080P; Honkai: Star Rail holds a steady 60fps with power consumption reduced by 15%; Contra: Future runs at a stable 185fps; and Delta Force supports 185fps frame interpolation, lowering per-frame power draw by 22% compared with 120fps in HD mode.
Item Specification Process 2nm CPU configuration 2x 4.55GHz C2-Ultra + 3x 4.35GHz C2 PRO + 3x 3.10GHz C2 PRO Cache 34.5MB AI processor APU 1090 GPU 12-core Mali G2 Ultra NX