Credit: MediaTekTL;DRMediaTek has announced new Dimensity 9500s and Dimensity 8500 chipsets.Despite their new names, the chipsets repackage designs from previous generations with minimal upgrades.The move appears inspired by Qualcomm’s recent launch of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5.Over the years, MediaTek’s flagship Dimensity chips have improved enough to put up a tough fight against Qualcomm’s Elite mobile chips. The latest Dimensity 9500 proved to be too close to the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in our testing. Now, just a few months after its release, MediaTek is launching a slightly less powerful variant, the Dimensity 9500s, likely geared towards affordable flagships. Along with it, MediaTek has also launched the Dimensity 8500, which might be geared towards the upper mid-range.Dimensity 9500The Dimensity 9500s is built on TSMC’s N3E 3nm process, the same as the 9500, and maintains the same CPU architecture with “all big cores.” But instead of deploying Arm’s flagship and the newest C1 cores, the Dimensity 9500s uses older Cortex-X925 at 3.73GHz for the prime core, complemented by three Arm Cortex-X4 cores and four Arm Cortex-A720 cores at undisclosed clock speeds. This configuration is identical to the Dimensity 9400 and 9400 Plus chipsets from MediaTek’s previous lineups.