The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell-on-earth yarn that the Dimensity 9600 lineup will not be a one-chip affair after all, but MediaTek is having problems cooling it.
For those who came in late, the Dimensity 9600 Pro variant is tipped for later this year to take a swing at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro.
Weibo tipster Digital Chat Station claims the silicon is chasing desktop-level performance with a 5.00GHz target and a new CPU cluster, but MediaTek still cannot cool it properly.
Unlike the Dimensity 9500, which relied on a single high-performance core, the Dimensity 9600 Pro is expected to pack two ‘super cores’ for higher single-core and multi-core performance and hotter temperatures.
Phones do not get the chunky heatsinks desktops enjoy, so you are stuck with a vapour chamber and maybe liquid cooling or an active fan if a vendor wants to get silly.
Even then, the heat is expected to win, pushing the Dimensity 9600 Pro to throttle down into a 4.00 to 4.20GHz range once the short burst is done.
MediaTek is tipped to stick with ARM CPU designs rather than an in-house approach like Qualcomm’s Oryon cores, which could mean lower efficiency and faster throttling.
There is some hope in the move to TSMC’s 2nm ‘N2P’ process, which might buy the thermal headroom needed to touch those clocks without instantly choking.
The chip is still expected to use a ‘2 + 3 + 3’ CPU cluster, and it would be the first time MediaTek adopts that configuration. A standard Dimensity 9600 may follow, with less aggressive clock speeds.
