Earlier this year, MediaTek unveiled the Dimensity 8500, a 4nm (TSMC N4P) chipset with all-big CPU cores (eight Cortex-A725) and a Mali-G720 MC8 GPU. Now the company is refreshing that chip as the Dimensity 8550.
The key addition here is the LLM Booster and support for Google’s Gemini Nano V3, which is designed to run on your phone. This new version of the chip still uses the NPU 880.
The rest is the same. The CPU has its top Cortex-A725 core running at up to 3.4GHz. This core is equipped with 1MB of L2 cache. The second cluster is three A725s at up to 3.2GHz, each with 512KB of L2 cache. Finally, there are four A725s running at up to 2.2GHz with 256KB of L2 cache.
The Honor 600 Pro for China is the first phone to use the Dimensity 8550
The GPU is the aforementioned Mali-G720 MC8 with support for 1440p+ displays up to 144Hz. The video encoder can do 4K @ 60fps while the decoder supports AV1.
The chip is designed to work with fast LPDDR5X RAM (9,600Mbps) and UFS 4 storage. It has a 5G modem (dual SIM dual active), plus support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4.
The first phone to use the new Dimensity 8550 is already official – it’s the Chinese version of the Honor 600 Pro.