In the past few days, we have been hearing details about MediaTek's promising Dimensity 9600 Pro chipset. Now, well-known Weibo tipster Digital Chat Station (DCS) has dropped exclusive details about the upcoming Dimensity 9600 Pro and the specs look seriously impressive. In line with earlier leaks, the Dimensity 9600 Pro specifications see it hit almost 5 GHz, which is an incredible milestone for smartphone performance.
Dimensity 9600 Pro Will See a Massive CPU Overhaul
According to DCS's recent leak, the Dimensity 9600 Pro will feature 2x Canyon cores + 3x Gelas-b cores + 3x Gelas cores, resulting in a 2+3+3 all-big-core CPU design. This will be the first time the Dimensity series will pack two big prime cores and the CPU can reportedly touch a maximum frequency of nearly 5 GHz. It will also support SME2 extension for CPU-driven AI workloads.
Now, it's likely the big Canyon core is actually Arm's C2-Ultra core, and the other two Gelas cores could be C2-Premium and C2-Pro. The chipset will also pack an Arm Magni GPU and will support the next-gen LPDDR6 RAM and UFS 5.0 storage. On paper, it looks like a loaded spec sheet.
On the manufacturing side, DCS says the Dimensity 9600 Pro will be built on TSMC's N2P (2nm) process node with GAA transistors. Now, DCS has clarified that the claimed 10-15% performance jump and 25-30% power reduction are due to the N2P process gains, not the chip's overall improvement. The actual performance jump should be larger once we know the architectural improvements.
Having said that, raising the frequency to 5 GHz on a mobile chip could lead to extreme overheating and performance throttling. We have already seen that the Dimensity 9500 chipset, operating at a peak frequency of 4.21 GHz, struggles to sustain its performance after a few minutes.
Now, with dual prime cores, running at near-5 GHz could generate serious heat, and without an adequate cooling system, the chip could throttle down and may result in sub-par performance. This year, OEMs will have to adopt superior thermal solutions like large vapour chambers and liquid cooling.
It will be interesting to see how MediaTek balances raw performance and thermal management with such sky-high frequencies. It appears MediaTek is going after Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro with an aggressive approach and perhaps this year, the company will beat Qualcomm's custom Oryon CPU core.
