I Spent Two Hours With the MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro, Here's Everything You Should Know

I don't usually get excited looking at engineering samples. They're ugly, bulky, and about as far away from the polished smartphones we eventually buy as you can get. But the one sitting in front of me during MediaTek's recent briefing was different, mostly because of what was hiding inside it.

It was running the new MediaTek Dimensity 9600 Pro, the company's first flagship chip built on TSMC's 2nm process. More importantly, I spent roughly two hours watching this thing being pushed through benchmarks and games, and there was no fan or active cooling solution helping it along.

There is an important disclaimer here. This was still pre-production hardware, although MediaTek told us it doesn't expect the benchmark performance to change when commercial devices arrive. So, while this isn't quite the same as testing the chip inside a finished flagship, it gave me a pretty good idea of what the Dimensity 9600 Pro is capable of.

MediaTek Has Made One Big Change to the CPU

The Dimensity 9600 Pro sticks with MediaTek's all-big-core philosophy, but the arrangement has changed quite significantly. The Dimensity 9500 used a 1+3+4 configuration, while the 9600 Pro moves to 2+3+3.

That means there are now two prime C2 Ultra cores instead of one. On paper, that's a pretty straightforward way of throwing more CPU performance at demanding workloads. Of course, adding another prime core also means another potentially power-hungry core, and that's where moving to 2nm becomes particularly important. MediaTek is banking on the smaller process to give it enough efficiency headroom to be more aggressive with performance.

There's more cache too. The 9600 Pro gets 34.5MB of total cache, including 16MB of L3, while L2 cache has increased by 21% compared to the Dimensity 9500.

It also supports LPDDR6 memory and UFS 5.0 storage, although there's an interesting detail here: the engineering sample I saw was actually using LPDDR5X memory. In other words, the numbers I saw weren't coming from the fastest memory configuration the chip technically supports.

The Benchmark Gains Are Hard to Ignore

Of course, architecture changes don't mean much if they don't translate into better performance, and this is where things started getting interesting.

Before getting into the numbers, there's one important distinction. These results compare the Dimensity 9600 Pro engineering sample with a Dimensity 9500 engineering sample, not a retail phone powered by the 9500. That makes this a much cleaner comparison of what has changed between the two chips.

Geekbench 6 gives us a decent idea of CPU performance, and there's a pretty healthy jump here. The Dimensity 9600 Pro is nearly 18% faster in single-core and 17% in multi-core performance. I actually expected the multi-core result to pull further ahead because of that second prime core, but seeing single-core move by almost the same amount is arguably more interesting. This isn't simply MediaTek throwing another big core at the problem.

The GPU improvement is harder to ignore. MediaTek has moved to a new 12-core Mali G2 Ultra NX GPU, complete with its third generation of hardware ray tracing. In Steel Nomad Light, the new GPU pushes the score up by nearly 27%, with the average frame rate moving from 25fps to 31.65fps.

Flagship smartphone CPUs have already been ridiculously quick for a while, so personally, this is the kind of generational improvement I'm more interested in seeing. And thankfully, MediaTek didn't stop at showing us benchmark numbers.

The Gaming Demo Told Me More Than Geekbench Did

Benchmarks are fun, but they're also incredibly good at showing you a big number for a few minutes. I was more interested in what happened when the Dimensity 9600 Pro had to keep working.

Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves both held 60fps during 30-minute sessions. Hitman: Absolution was demonstrated running at up to 120fps, while BGMI also ran at 120fps during an extended session.

The peak numbers aren't really what caught my attention. A modern flagship chip hitting 60fps in Genshin doesn't make me fall out of my chair anymore. It was the consistency that looked promising. Watching those performance graphs stay around their targets after the chip had already been working for a while tells me considerably more than seeing 120fps flash on a screen for 30 seconds.

And again, this was being demonstrated on an engineering sample without active cooling.

I'm still not going to call this the new mobile gaming king based on that. Put the same chip inside a thin retail phone, change the cooling system, power limits and software tuning, and you could get very different results. That's why I really want to repeat some of these tests on an actual phone.

MediaTek Is Betting Heavily on What Comes After Today's AI

Performance isn't the only big change. MediaTek is also introducing a dual-NPU architecture, pairing its main NPU with a smaller eNPU designed to handle lighter workloads without waking the more power-hungry hardware every time. MediaTek says the eNPU can be at least 40% more power efficient for suitable workloads.

There's also 2x the INT4 compute performance compared to the previous generation. Without getting lost in AI terminology, INT4 essentially allows AI models to work at lower numerical precision, reducing memory and compute requirements. That's increasingly important if we want larger models doing useful things locally rather than constantly reaching for the cloud.

The engineering sample recorded a 31,292.9 Device AI Score in the ETH Zurich AI benchmark. MediaTek ultimately sees this architecture feeding into more capable on-device generative AI and eventually agentic AI through its wider AgentOS ambitions. I'm more interested in seeing those experiences than another AI benchmark, but the hardware groundwork is clearly being laid.

Now I Want to Use It in an Actual Phone

And that's really where I am with the Dimensity 9600 Pro after seeing it in action. The benchmark gains are big, but the sustained performance is what stuck with me. An engineering sample can show us what the silicon is capable of, but putting it inside a much thinner retail phone, with an OEM's own cooling, power limits and software tuning, is an entirely different test.

Thankfully, we probably won't have to wait too long to find out. Historically, OPPO's Find X Pro and vivo's X Pro flagships have been among the first phones to debut MediaTek's latest flagship Dimensity chips, so retail hardware shouldn't be too far away. And after spending two hours watching the Dimensity 9600 Pro perform inside a rather strange-looking engineering sample, I'm much more interested in getting it inside an actual phone and seeing how much of this performance survives in my pocket.