MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro launched: First 2nm chip brings LPDDR6, UFS 5.0 and dual NPU

MediaTek has launched the Dimensity 9600 Pro, its latest flagship smartphone processor and the company’s first chipset built using TSMC’s 2nm N2P process.

The new chip features a 2+3+3 CPU configuration, with one additional prime core compared with the Dimensity 9500. It supports LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.0 storage, both firsts for the Dimensity family, along with up to 34.5MB of total cache.

For graphics, the Dimensity 9600 Pro gets a new 12-core Mali G2 Ultra NX GPU with third-generation ray tracing. It also introduces MediaTek’s Neural Graphics Architecture for AI-powered features such as super-resolution upscaling.

Dimensity 9600 Pro gaming and benchmark performance

MediaTek demonstrated the processor using a pre-production DX6 engineering sample and said benchmark scores are expected to remain unchanged on commercial devices. The test unit had no active cooling, including no fan or additional cooling system.

The company demonstrated Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves running at a locked 60fps for 30 minutes. Hitman Absolution was tested at up to 120fps for around 30 minutes, while BGMI ran at 120fps for one hour.

MediaTek compared the results with a Dimensity 9500 engineering sample. The company also demonstrated the chip on Geekbench 6, Geekbench 7, 3DMark Steel Nomad Light and 3DMark Solar Bay Extreme. Geekbench 7 uses a different methodology and scoring scale from Geekbench 6, so the scores are not directly comparable.

Dual NPU for on-device AI

The Dimensity 9600 Pro uses a dual-NPU architecture, combining a primary NPU with a power-efficient eNPU for lighter, always-on AI workloads. This allows heavier generative AI workloads to be handled separately.

MediaTek claims a two-fold improvement in INT4 compute over the previous generation. INT4 uses four-bit precision for AI computation, reducing memory and compute requirements and helping larger AI models run on-device.

The company also reported a score of 31,232 on the ETH Zurich AI Benchmark and demonstrated lower time-to-first-token latency with INT4 compared with INT8 workloads.

The Dimensity 9600 Pro follows MediaTek’s multi-generation push into the flagship segment, which began with the Dimensity 9000 in 2021 and later expanded with the all-big-core Dimensity 9300 and subsequent Dimensity 9400 and 9500 platforms.

Commercial smartphones powered by the Dimensity 9600 Pro will ultimately determine how these specifications translate into sustained performance, battery life and real-world AI workloads.

This gives the piece a more balanced ending without undermining the launch specifications.