Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 is soon to face its fiercest rival yet. MediaTek has also teased an upcoming flagship Dimensity launch, with the talking wireless fraternity all-but-certain that the phone giant is about to uncork the 9500 (a high-end, 3nm chip created to hurtle toward Qualcomm in power, economy of battery use, graphics and on-device AI).
MediaTek’s arrival is an assault on the Android speed throne
MediaTek released a post on its authorized Weibo channel that we will soon see next-gen a Dimensity platform. The company hasn’t named the chip — it’s expected to be called the Dimensity 9500, a direct successor designed for ultra-premium phones, according to much of the supply-chain chat. Its timing puts it straight in competition with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, paving the way for a rare back-to-back flagship bout.
Rumored silicon: 3nm, next-gen CPU cores, more AI muscle
Leaked specs from the usually accurate tipster Digital Chat Station suggest MediaTek is leveraging TSMC’s advanced N3 process. And that node is a efficiency-based progression in TSMC’s 3nm family, with tighter voltages and thermals which are exactly what prolonged gaming and AI workloads need. The CPU arrangement is said to pair up one ultra-high-performance Arm core with three big cores and four efficiency cores, the entire complement based on Arm’s latest v9-era designs and engineered for agressive clocks.
On the graphics side, that’s apparently an “Mali G1-Ultra” group of GPU in a 12-core layout, suggesting that Sony is gunning for higher sustained frame rates and modern feature support such as hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
On the AI side, the chip reportedly comes including an NPU offering approximately 100 TOPS (presumably in INT8), combined with a CPU-side acceleration through Arm’s Scalable Matrix Extension 2 (SME2). In practical terms, this should speed up token generation by large language models, image diffusion and video-style generative effects right on the phone.
How it might compare to Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5
Qualcomm’s leader platforms have relied heavily on high single-core burst performance, efficient multi-core scheduling and a well-tuned Adreno GPU – add to that a Hexagon NPU that has been slowly but steadily increasing its numbers in terms of TOPS and mixed-precision support. Anticipate 8 Elite Gen 5 will double-down on those wins, as well as even tighter camera, connectivity and AI inferences with 1st-party frameworks.
Recent generations yield some clues to the probably dynamics. Independent reviews of past MediaTek and Qualcomm flagships (from such outlets as NotebookCheck and GSMArena) have frequently found Qualcomm with a CPU advantage in peak benchmarks, while MediaTek has surprised on the strength of competitive GPUs and cooler operating temperatures on sustained loads. If the Dimensity 9500’s rumored clocks and 3nm efficiency advantages come to fruition, that delta could close — particularly during long gaming sprees or intense AI tasks that stomp all over thermals.
Early devices to watch
Multiple leaks suggest the first wave of phones could include vivo’s X300 series, with talk of a co-developed V-series imaging processor embedded alongside the Dimensity silicon. That is similar to what photo-centric brands have accomplished by combining dedicated ISPs with main SoCs, allowing features of multi-frame HDR fusion, advanced denoising, and real-time semantic segmentation without redlining heating. OPPO’s Find X9 line has also been rumored, and there’s that a flagship Android tablet family might adopt the chip.
Why this showdown matters for on-device AI
Smartphone AI is transitioning from cloud-first to hybrid and on-device execution. A 100 TOPS-class NPU — if validated — would be a meaningful boost to real-time generative tools: background video origination at higher resolutions, offline transcription and speaker separation, instant image editing capable of rivaling desktop apps. With SME2 on the CPU side, cosine-similarity-based operations needed for LLMs and diffusion pipelines can be divvied up around more of the chip, boosting token-per-second throughput while improving battery performance under loaded.
The platform partners Annoble as much as silicon. Mainstream framework support — Google’s Gemini Nano, Meta’s Llama models, Stable Diffusion variants, and Qualcomm/MediaTek- optimized toolchains — will determine how rapidly developers can publish features that feel native, fast, and private on the device.
Beyond 3nm: MediaTek’s 2nm milestone
MediaTek has also revealed that it has taped out its first flagship on TSMC’s 2nm node, which is expected to be a Dimensity 9600-series part. The company claims that shifting to 2nm results in double-digit performance improvements at the same power, as well as “power savings” at the same speed, marking another jump in sustained performance per watt. TSMC’s roadmap supports those efficiency gains, which ought to mean longer gaming runs, quicker AI inference and cooler devices.
Market context adds emphasis to what is at stake. ITS has repeatedly posted about how MediaTek leads in global smartphone SoC shipments and Qualcomm owns the premium tier in revenue and ASPs. A competitive Dimensity 9500 would force Qualcomm to further defend its dominance in the ultra-flagship space, bring some of that A.I. competition consumers see at the mid-range all the way to top-tier flagships, and push forward the cause of giving users solid battery life or camera performance or smoother gaming experiences no matter whose logo ends up stamped on their new phone’s box.
