110fps Gaming and All-Big-Cores: Meet the Dimensity 8500

MediaTek just pulled the curtain back on its latest hardware, and it is a bit of a shocker. While the world was looking for a new flagship, the company dropped the Dimensity 8500. This chip isn't just a small step up; it’s a full-on sprint. Announced alongside the high-end 9500s, this new processor is built specifically for the "flagship-style" phones that most of us actually carry. It’s about getting top-tier power without the eye-watering price tag.

Most chips use a mix of big and small cores to save power. MediaTek says "no thanks" to that. The Dimensity 8500 uses an all-big-core design built on TSMC’s refined 4nm process. You get eight Cortex-A725 cores working together. One "prime" core runs at a massive 3.4GHz. This isn't just marketing fluff. By using only high-performance cores, the chip feels much faster when you’re jumping between apps or trying to export a video. It is about 7% faster than last year’s model, but it feels even snappier thanks to support for super-fast LPDDR5X memory.

The biggest news is for gamers. The new Mali-G720 MC8 GPU is a beast. It gives you a 25% jump in peak performance. More impressively, it cuts power use by 20%. MediaTek is claiming this is the first chip in its class to bring realistic ray tracing to affordable phones. Imagine playing a MOBA at a stable 110fps even when it’s 35 degrees outside. They’ve added special tech that saves up to 37% of your battery during long gaming sessions. No more mid-match shutdowns because your phone got too hot.

Since it’s 2026, you can't have a chip without AI. The NPU 880 handles the heavy lifting here. It’s powerful enough to do real-time image generation and live translation right on your device. For photos, it uses "Ultra-Clear Telephoto" tools to fix blurry zoom shots and even removes annoying reflections from windows. It’s like having a professional editor living inside your phone.