MediaTek Advances Smartphone Chip Technology With TSMC's 2nm Process

MediaTek unveiled its Dimensity 9600 Pro in Taipei on September 15, 2026, marking the first time the company has built a smartphone processor on TSMC's 2-nanometer manufacturing process. It's a milestone MediaTek had been working toward since completing the chip's tape-out, the point where a finished design is handed off to the fab for manufacturing, according to a MediaTek press release from July 15, 2026.

Two-nanometer is a shorthand for how tightly transistors can be packed onto a chip, and the smaller the number, generally, the more efficient the resulting silicon. TSMC's specific version here is called N2P, and it's notable because it's the first TSMC process built around nanosheet transistors, a structural change from the FinFET design used in prior generations. Compared with TSMC's older N3E process, MediaTek and TSMC say N2P delivers up to 18 percent more performance at the same power draw, roughly 36 percent lower power use at the same speed, and about 1.2 times greater logic density. Those figures describe the manufacturing process itself, not a specific chip's real-world benchmark results.

On the chip itself, MediaTek says the Dimensity 9600 Pro uses a "2+3+3 All Big Core" CPU layout, skipping smaller efficiency cores in favor of nine higher-performance cores, paired with Arm's new G2-Ultra NX GPU and two onboard neural processing units for AI tasks. MediaTek claims up to 17 percent higher single-core performance and 15 percent higher multi-core performance than its previous flagship, alongside a 61 percent cut in multi-core power consumption. The company also says the chip's AI processing is 51 percent faster at handling prompts before a generative AI model begins responding, though MediaTek has not disclosed how that figure was measured, so it should be read as a company claim rather than an independently verified result. The chip supports 4K slow-motion video capture at 240 frames per second.

Alongside the 9600 Pro, MediaTek introduced the Dimensity 9600M, a companion chip aimed at a broader range of high-end phones. It's worth being clear that the 9600M is built on TSMC's older 3nm process, not 2nm, so the two chips shouldn't be confused with each other.

As for availability, MediaTek and multiple outlets covering the launch say phones using the new chips are expected before the end of 2026, with Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Samsung, Motorola and Realme mentioned as likely early adopters. None of that has been confirmed as a firm release date for any specific device, and no phone has yet shipped with the chip.

The launch puts MediaTek ahead of Qualcomm in the race to 2nm smartphone silicon. Qualcomm's rival Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, also expected to use TSMC's N2P process, was reported to be arriving within about a week of MediaTek's announcement. Apple got to 2nm first, having already shipped its A20 Pro chip in the iPhone 18 lineup on the same TSMC node.

The move also reflects a broader shift underway at TSMC. The company has said 2nm production accounted for roughly 3 percent of its wafer revenue in the second quarter of 2026, with a steeper ramp expected in the second half of the year, alongside Apple, Nvidia and AMD as other adopters of the node. TSMC has cautioned that this ramp could weigh on gross margins by 3 to 4 percentage points in the near term, even as demand for 2nm capacity remains strong, underscoring how significant, and costly, this generational shift is for the wider chip industry.