TAIPEI, Taiwan — MediaTek unveiled its new flagship smartphone processor Monday, the Dimensity 9600 Pro, becoming the first chipmaker to bring a mobile processor built on TSMC's cutting-edge 2-nanometer manufacturing process to market, putting the Taiwanese company ahead of its main rival, Qualcomm, in the race to commercialize the next generation of chip fabrication technology.

The Dimensity 9600 Pro is built on TSMC's N2P process, an enhanced version of the foundry's 2-nanometer node. Qualcomm is expected to adopt the same TSMC process for the first time with its Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, which is due to arrive next week, meaning MediaTek's launch gives it a brief but notable head start in bringing 2-nanometer silicon to smartphones.

The new chip departs from conventional smartphone processor design by abandoning small, power-saving efficiency cores entirely in favor of an all-big-core layout. Its eight-core CPU is arranged in a 2 3 3 configuration: two C2-Ultra cores clocked up to 4.55 gigahertz with 2 megabytes of Level 2 cache each, three C2-Pro cores at 4.35 gigahertz with 1 megabyte of cache each, and three additional C2-Pro cores at 3.1 gigahertz with 512 kilobytes of cache each. Combined with 16 megabytes of Level 3 cache, the chip carries a total of 34.5 megabytes of cache, which MediaTek says represents a 21% increase over its previous-generation Dimensity 9500 and should help reduce memory access delays during heavy workloads. The processor packs more........

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