Technologies

MediaTek’s Next Chip Will Boost Low-Power AI in Next Year’s Top Android Phones

The Dimensity 9500 ramps up competition for Android phone chips.

MediaTek has unveiled its next big chip for premium Android phones, promising improvements for performance and AI operations.

MediaTek’s chip, the Dimensity 9500, debuts at a seemingly deliberate moment just days before Qualcomm is set to reveal its own silicon, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. While we don’t know the latter’s performance metrics, it will almost certainly compete with the Dimensity 9500 to run the most powerful Android smartphones. The first phones running MediaTek’s new chip will be Vivo and Oppo handsets launching in October for release in Europe, South America and Asia, but not the US yet.

MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 has a mix of improvements over its predecessor, last year’s Dimensity 9400. Its CPU cluster has 29% higher single-core and 16% higher multi-core performance, while also drawing 37% less power. Moving to Universal Flash Storage 4.1 (from UFS 4.0) enables memory, like in RAM, to read and write twice as fast. This also leads to 40% faster loading for large AI models, MediaTek said.

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The Dimensity 9500 roughly follows the design of MediaTek’s last few high-end chips. Its CPU cluster features an array of Arm’s newly-renamed C1-series silicon: one Arm C1-Ultra at 4.21 GHz, three Arm C1-Premium at 3.5GHz and four Arm C1-Pro at 2.7GHz.

For gaming, the Dimensity 9500’s graphics processing unit has 33% improved performance and is 42% more energy efficient, meaning longer play sessions on a device before needing to recharge it. The chip also doubles the performance of ray tracing, a technology enabling realistic shadows and reflections in mirrors and water surfaces that often pushes GPUs to their limits. The chip can render graphics at up to 120 frames per second with ray tracing turned on, and also supports graphics engines like Vulkan 1.4 and Unreal Engine 5.6.

Given the aggressive adoption of AI on mobile, it’s unsurprising that MediaTek also boosted artificial intelligence on its new chip. The Dimensity 9500’s NPU 990 has a smattering of upgrades over its predecessor, with 100% faster processing for the smaller 3 billion parameter models often used on smartphones (which typically top out at 7 billion parameters). The NPU (neural processing unit) is also 42% more power efficient when running small AI models. Finally, the mobile chip is the first in the industry to generate 4K images with AI, MediaTek said.

For large language models, the Dimensity 9500 is the first mobile chip to support BitNet 1-bit, which leads to 50% lower power consumption of LLMs.

The chip’s upgrades to camera processing include support for 4K portrait videos at 60 frames per second, as well as slow-motion 4K video at 120 FPS with Dolby Vision video that’s optically stabilized. The Dimensity 9500 carries on its predecessor’s support for up to 200-megapixel cameras.

The Dimensity 9500 also claims connectivity boosts over its predecessor, including 5CC carrier aggregation that increases bandwidth by 15%.

Technologies

As Rival Roblox Looms, Fortnite Will Let Creators Sell In-Game Items

For one year, at least, creators will also get a larger cut of the revenue.

Creators who make content for Fortnite can start monetizing their virtual goods in December.

The free-to-play online game’s publisher, Epic Games, announced Thursday that those in its Creator program will earn revenue from the sale of in-game items they’ve made and money they already earn from engagement payouts for Epic-created items.

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Before platform and store fees, those creators ordinarily will earn 50% of the value of V-Bucks earned (V-Bucks are the platform’s virtual currency). But from December until the end of 2026, Epic is boosting that revenue cut to 100% — again, before fees. Fees vary from 12% to 30%, depending on whether players buy items directly from the Epic Games Store or from platforms such as the PlayStation Store or the Xbox Store.

Epic has been involved in ongoing legal battles with Apple and Google over app store fees. This year, Fortnite returned to the iOS platform in Europe and to Android devices after being pulled over the disputes.

‘The dominant way Gen Z and Gen Alpha play, create and socialize’

One reason that Fortnite is sharing the wealth with community developers is that its biggest competitor, Roblox, has been growing with multiple hit games on its platforms. This month, Roblox boasted that its creators earned more than $1 billion in revenue for 2024.

Roblox’s dominance in user-generated content for gaming is likely to have forced Epic’s hand toward more monetization.

«This move is a necessary step for Fortnite to stay competitive, but more importantly, it reflects that UGC gaming and the metaverse are already the dominant way Gen Z and Gen Alpha play, create and socialize,» said Joe Ferencz, founder and CEO at Gamefam, which helps brands create metaverse games. «The future isn’t years away — it’s here now.»

Ferencz said that while some players in Fortnite and Roblox do support specific creators, many players simply want to have in-game items for their avatars and to show them off to their friends. Fortnite’s move to compensate creators for that, he said, is «another signal that UGC gaming is the place where players get the opportunity to express and explore their self identity — and it opens up new ways for creators and brands to be part of that culture.»

Roblox, meanwhile, has been dealing with other problems, including complaints from parents and child-advocacy groups about safety on the platform. These issues have prompted Roblox to introduce more monitoring and filtering features.

Technologies

Home Depot’s Giant Skelly Has a Voice This Halloween Thanks to a New App

Fall has arrived, and spooky season starts now. Check out the latest version of Home Depot’s skeleton, which is half the size but has animated features and can talk.

With the fall equinox on Monday marking the end of summer, it’s time to start setting up your Halloween decorations (if you haven’t already). And this year, Home Depot’s infamous giant skeleton returns with an app that gives the new Ultra Skelly a voice and fresh moves to spook trick-or-treaters.

Make no bones about it: Skelly’s going high-tech this spooky season. The new animatronic version is shorter than the original, at 6.5 feet tall, but you can freak out your whole neighborhood with this skeleton’s rotating upper torso, moving mouth and 18 LCD eye variations (ew).

Skelly can now chat with visitors through five preset recordings and up to 30 seconds of custom recording, plus Bluetooth capabilities that let you interact in real time. And you can modulate your voice to make everything sound extra spooky.

Skelly was originally launched in 2020, when the pandemic forced people to celebrate Halloween at a distance. Perhaps because of its giant stature — it’s easy to spot, even when social distancing — the skeleton became a hit and has been resurrected every year since with upgrades and friends. This year, those friends include dragons, trolls, scarecrows and a Skelly Cat (not to be confused with Smelly Cat).

You can order Skelly and company now on the Home Depot website or app for $279.