The morning light streamed through the glass façade of Barcelona’s W Hotel as Oppo engineers prepared for the global launch of the Find X9 Pro. Sitting at a quiet seaside table, Dr Yen-Chi Lee, General Manager of MediaTek’s Smartphone Business Unit, spoke with the calm confidence of a man whose company finally has a seat at the top table. “We used to be quick followers, and now we’re leaders,” he said in an interview with BW Businessworld on the sidelines of the Oppo Find X9 series global launch. “With many customers — Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi, and even Samsung — using our flagship chipsets, it shows our products are very competitive," he added.
Built on TSMC’s 3 nm process, the Dimensity 9500 powers both Oppo’s Find X9 Pro and Vivo’s upcoming X300 Pro, anchoring MediaTek’s most ambitious flagship offensive yet. The Find X9 series goes on sale globally this week and is expected to launch in India by mid-November 2025, followed by Vivo’s X300 series in December.
India sits at the centre of this story. IDC data for Q2 2025 shows MediaTek commanding 44.3 percent of India’s smartphone-chip shipments, ahead of Qualcomm’s 33.9 percent. Counterpoint’s Q1 data places the gap at 45 percent to 32 percent. Globally, MediaTek now holds 38 percent of total SoC shipments against Qualcomm’s 28 percent — its widest lead in three years.
“These phones are some of the best camera smartphones in the market,” Lee said. “MediaTek works closely with Oppo and Vivo to design the best camera experiences. That’s what’s driving them to use our flagship chipsets — to deliver the best imaging experiences.”
For Indian consumers, where photography and battery life often matter more than raw numbers, the focus fits perfectly.
The Global Chip War: How MediaTek’s Strategy Differs
In the flagship chip race, every company defines performance differently. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 relies on its in-house Oryon CPU cores, an upgraded Adreno GPU and an AI engine that can fuse text, image and voice prompts locally — a bid for mobile AI dominance.
Apple, meanwhile, has turned the A19 and M5 chips into twin pillars of its ecosystem. Both share a unified architecture that lets developers bring console-class games and creative apps from the Mac to the iPhone 17 Pro with minimal rework. That synergy is why Resident Evil Village and Assassin’s Creed Mirage now run natively on iPhones — a feat enabled by Apple’s vertical integration across silicon and software.
Intel’s Panther Lake and Lunar Lake platforms take a different route, splitting CPU, GPU and NPU tasks into modular chiplets to create “AI PCs” that blur the line between desktop and mobile computing.
Amid these shifting architectures, MediaTek’s decision to use ARM’s reference cores looks like pragmatic minimalism. “ARM provides very good CPU and GPU designs,” Lee said. “We focus on making the best out of them through our own implementation. We’re confident that working with ARM gives us very competitive performance.”
“If you look at our GPU performance and power efficiency, it’s actually better than Apple and our competitors in some cases,” he added. “We have our own know-how to optimise CPU and GPU cores. Our focus is on areas like camera and AI processing — that’s where we differentiate ourselves.”
By basing its CPU cluster on ARM’s Cortex X5 and A7xx cores, MediaTek saves years of R&D while pouring its efforts into its Image Signal Processor and Neural Processing Unit — the parts that shape real-world performance.
Power, Performance And AI: Inside The Dimensity 9500
“The Dimensity 9500 is about balance,” Lee said talking about trade offs between performance, power efficiency and AI use cases. “It’s a combination of all three — power efficiency, sustained performance and peak power. It has very good power consumption, which means longer battery life. Phones like the Oppo Find X9 and Vivo X300 perform really well on power efficiency. For flagship smartphones, power consumption is the number one issue we try to overcome.”
He added the initial benchmarks reflect that balance on the Dimensity 9500. “If you look at benchmarks — Geekbench, GPU tests and AI performance like ETHZ — all are top notch compared to other smartphone chips,” Lee noted. When asked about AI throughput, he clarified: “Just the NPU. Ours is over 100 TOPS just on the NPU.” This means, the NPU on the Dimensity 9500 is faster than that of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme which is a PC chip.
That design differs from Apple’s A19 and M5 chips, whose Neural Engines spread AI tasks across CPU and GPU clusters. MediaTek’s stand-alone NPU gives Android OEMs more control to customise AI features without changing their entire SoC design.
“For flagship smartphones, BOM cost isn’t the first priority,” Lee said. “The main question for us and our partners is how to create differentiation and new user experiences — how to solve pain points like power efficiency, camera quality or gaming performance. If you can do that, cost isn’t the deciding factor.”
Gaming, Cameras And The Android Challenge
In gaming, the divide between Apple and Android is stark. Thanks to the A19 and M5’s unified architecture, AAA titles now run across iPhones and Macs with ease. Android, by contrast, remains fragmented — developers must optimise for Qualcomm, MediaTek, Google, Samsung, Huawei and Xiaomi chipsets with distinct drivers and NPUs.
“To have the best gaming experience, it’s not just about having a powerful chipset,” Lee said. “The gaming ecosystem — studios and engines — also needs to support it. Dimensity 9500 supports Unreal Engine, Unity Engine 5.5 and 5.6 features for advanced visual effects. We’re also talking to many studios in China and other regions to optimise their games for the Dimensity 9000 series.” Lee believes that developer partnerships are key to delivering console-class graphics on Android.
He adds that the camera pipeline is very important and is only possible because of the close collaboration between MediaTek and its OEM partners has enabled phones powered by Dimensity 9000 series to be class leading camera phones.
“I really like the portrait mode in low light — it captures natural-looking faces without harsh flash effects,” he said talking about the Oppo Find X9 Pro.
“These improvements come from close collaboration between MediaTek and partners like Oppo and Vivo. We link the ISP and NPU pipelines so they work together efficiently. That allows us to run more algorithms with lower power consumption, improving low-light and portrait performance significantly.”
The Importance Of 2nm & India
At Computex 2025 in Taipei, MediaTek announced the tape-out of its first 2 nm chip with TSMC — a breakthrough first reported by BW Businessworld. “It’s a huge deal,” Lee said. “The main goal is to reduce power even further. As we add more AI and camera features, thermal limits become an issue. Moving to 2 nanometres allows significant power reduction, enabling us to add more algorithms and features for better camera, AI and gaming performance. So yes, it’s a very big deal.”
The 2 nm leap places MediaTek alongside Apple’s A19 Pro and ahead of Qualcomm’s next Oryon-based flagship, confirming it has joined the top tier of chipmakers.
India is integral to this moment. Under the Production Linked Incentive scheme, Oppo and Vivo have expanded local flagship production. For MediaTek, it means its most advanced chips will power devices made in India for global markets. With its challenging network conditions and hot climate, India is also the perfect test bed for the Dimensity 9500’s modem and thermal optimisations.
With Qualcomm pursuing custom cores, Apple refining its full-stack approach via the A19 and M5, and Intel reinventing the PC for AI, MediaTek’s ARM-based path looks both fast and focused. It lets the company move quicker, work closer with OEMs and deliver what users actually feel — better cameras, cooler phones and longer battery life.
As the Find X9 series heads to India and the 2 nm generation approaches, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 stands as both a technical milestone and a statement of intent: the company is no longer following California or San Diego’s lead — it’s charting its own course. |
