MediaTek shook up the mobile market on 15 September 2026 by unveiling the Dimensity 9600 Pro — its first flagship on TSMC's 2 nm process. The chipset is built using the new Arm C2 architecture and Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU, targets the premium segment and paves the way into the era of on-device edge AI.
The chip's compute core follows a revolutionary 2+3+3 All Big Core scheme: two Arm C2-Ultra cores at 4,55 GHz (with 2 MB of L2 cache each), three C2-Pro at 4,35 GHz (1 MB L2) and three C2-Pro at 3,1 GHz (512 KB L2). Compared with the Dimensity 9500 (3 nm), single-threaded performance rose by 17%, multi-threaded by 15%, while multi-threaded energy efficiency improved by 61% — the main achievement of the move to 2 nm. The L3 cache is 16 MB, the system cache 10 MB, for a total of 34,5 MB of cache (21% more than its predecessor).
The Mali-G2 Ultra NX GPU delivers a peak performance gain of 27%, ray tracing acceleration of 18% and a power consumption reduction of 24%. The chip supports gaming at over 185 frames per second and neural rendering for high-performance supersampling. Memory is LPDDR6 (with 33% higher bandwidth) or LPDDR5X, and storage is UFS 5.0 with double the read/write speed of dual-channel UFS 4.1.
But the main highlight is AI. The dual NPU architecture is based on the NPU 1090, capable of doubling INT4 performance, running on-device LLM models of up to 30 billion parameters including Mixture-of-Experts, and provides 51% acceleration in the prefill phase (prompt processing) and 55% improvement in token generation per watt. MediaTek claims that, when integrated with the new Scheduling Engine 3.0, the combined architecture achieves 40% acceleration in LLM token generation and cuts power consumption by 27% at equivalent performance. The secondary Super Efficient NPU 2.0 handles background AI tasks (smart suggestions, scene detection) with 40% lower power consumption, letting devices work as true agentic assistants. The chipset supports Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6.2, 5G Rel-17 and cameras up to 200 MP with 4K 240 fps slow-motion and 8K 60 fps video recording, including hardware decoding of H.266 (VVC).
The first Dimensity 9600 Pro phones will make themselves known almost simultaneously. Vivo will officially unveil the X500 Pro and X500 Pro Max on 21 September, becoming the first company to announce the chipset, and OPPO will follow a day later on 22 September with the Find X500 Pro Max — both will be front-runners of the new architecture in the global rollout. These devices will realize the chip's much-touted potential: Vivo will focus on professional video (4K 120 fps 10-bit Log) and AI-enhanced photography, while OPPO balances gaming and AI performance through smart resource allocation (Tide Engine and Falcon Scheduler) plus a 8000 mAh battery with a promise of 5 years of health.
Context is worth noting: the Dimensity 9600 Pro is the third 2 nm mobile chipset (after the Samsung Exynos 2600 and Apple A20 Pro), but MediaTek became the first to publicly announce shipping a commercial 2 nm platform into smartphones. Compared with the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro (also 2 nm), MediaTek wins on energy efficiency and the scale of on-device AI, while real-world tests will only appear when the first phones launch.
The Dimensity 9600 Pro is a visible step forward in energy efficiency and local AI capabilities of flagship Android smartphones in 2026–2027. If MediaTek's claims hold up in real-world conditions, this could redefine the priorities of the premium segment.
