Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs MediaTek Dimensity 9500: Benchmarks and Specs

Since the last few years, MediaTek has been posing strong competition to Qualcomm with its Dimensity lineup. This year, MediaTek launched its premium Dimensity 9500 processor, packing Arm's powerful C1-series CPU and G1 Ultra GPU built on the Lumex platform. But can it beat Qualcomm's latest flagship, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5? To answer that, we have compared the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500 across Geekbench and AnTuTu. On that note, let's begin.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs Dimensity 9500: Geekbench Score

During the launch event, MediaTek officially announced the Geekbench score of the Dimensity 9500. In Geekbench 6.4, the Dimensity 9500 achieved a remarkable score of 4,007 points in single-core and 11,217 in multi-core tasks. On the other hand, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, in a leaked Geekbench listing (likely running on the Xiaomi 17 Pro), achieved 3,831 in single-core tasks and 11,525 in multi-threaded tasks.

Based on these early Geekbench figures, the Dimensity 9500 appears 4.6% faster than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in single-core tasks, which is impressive. And in multi-core tasks, the 8 Elite Gen 5 takes a marginal lead of 2.7%. This shows that Arm's new C1-series CPU, powering the Dimensity 9500, is powerful compared to Qualcomm's 3rd-gen Oryon CPU.

It's worth mentioning that MediaTek is achieving this CPU performance at a peak frequency of just 4.21GHz whereas the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 touches 4.61GHz -- a considerable gap of 400MHz. It means that the Dimensity 9500 is not only more performant, but also very efficient in terms of CPU performance. The credit goes to Arm and MediaTek for pulling this off.

That said, since these are MediaTek’s own published scores, it’s best to take them with a grain of salt. In fact, during the launch event, Qualcomm even took a jab seemingly at MediaTek, saying that it doesn't run benchmarks in “freezer environments” to inflate performance gains. We will soon run multiple benchmarks on both chipsets to find the real performance gap.

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs Dimensity 9500: Specs Comparison

Both processors are fabricated on TSMC's improved 3nm (N3P) process node and pack eight CPU cores. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 features its Nuvia-designed, in-house Oryon v3 CPU cores, while the Dimensity 9500 comes with Arm's latest C1-series CPU cores based on the Lumex platform. On the GPU front, the 8 Elite Gen 5 brings the Adreno 840 GPU and the Dimensity 9500 integrates Arm's new Mali-G1 Ultra MC12 GPU.