MediaTek Dimensity 8500 Chip Launch Date Announced; May Feature Mali-G720 GPU

The MediaTek Dimensity 8500 chipset will be launched this month, the company announced on Monday. In recent weeks, the rumour mill has suggested that the chipmaker was testing the upcoming mobile processor for powering several upcoming phones, and it could offer performance and efficiency improvements over its predecessor, the Dimensity 8400. As per reports, the Dimensity 8500 chipset could have a peak clock speed of 3.40GHz and be paired with a Mali-G720 GPU.

MediaTek Dimensity 8500 Chipset Launch Date

According to a Weibo post by MediaTek, the Dimensity 8500 chipset will be launched in China on January 15 at 3pm local time (12:30pm IST). The chipmaker, however, has yet to reveal any details about the upcoming processor.

Per reports, the Dimensity 8500 will be manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process. It is said to feature an octa-core architecture, comprising one performance core with a 3.40GHz clock speed, three mid-cores operating at 3.20GHz, and four efficiency cores operating at 2.20GHz.

The upcoming Dimensity chipset could be paired with the Mali-G720 MC8 GPU. Leaks suggest that the chipset has scored over 2.2 million points on the AnTuTu benchmark. It is reported to outperform the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 processors in terms of GPU performance.

While the SoC is yet to be launched, reports suggest that it could arrive with an upcoming Honor smartphone that packs a 10,000mAh battery. This is expected to be the Honor Power 2. Apart from this, Xiaomi is also said to be developing the Xiaomi 17T, which may feature the same Dimensity 8500 processor.

The MediaTek Dimensity 8500 chipset is said to bring several upgrades over its preceding SoC. For context, the Dimensity 8400, launched in December 2024, features eight Arm Cortex-A725 cores, with a peak clock speed of 4.32GHz, although the cores have different memory caches. It also features the Dimensity Agentic AI Engine (DAE), which was first introduced with the Dimensity 9400 chip. MediaTek claims it can turn traditional AI applications into sophisticated agentic AI applications.