On-device AI for Greater Peace of Mind! Dimensity 9500’s Powerful Dual NPUs

AI has become an unavoidable core topic for mobile terminals. Generative AI and large models have fully penetrated mobile terminals, bringing users many conveniences such as document summarization, audio transcription, and image processing.

At the same time, AI applications have also brought new risks. In the past, most AI functions relied on large cloud models, which not only posed a risk of privacy data leakage, but were also limited by network conditions, resulting in problems such as slow loading and inability to use offline, which seriously affected the user experience.

Recognizing this industry pain point, major manufacturers have been deploying edge AI, enabling local data processing through powerful hardware support, ensuring that sensitive information is never sent to the cloud, thus completely avoiding security risks and guaranteeing response speed.

Amid this trend, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 flagship chip stands out with its innovative dual-NPU architecture, firmly rooting its superior AI computing power on the device side. While delivering an excellent intelligent experience, it also builds a full-link privacy protection system from the underlying hardware to the upper-layer applications, redefining the on-device AI security standard for flagship mobile phones.

With the widespread adoption of AI smartphones, features such as real-time translation via voice assistants, meeting recording and transcription, and AI-powered image editing have become standard on flagship models. However, if these features rely on cloud computing, sensitive data such as user voice, images, and documents must be uploaded to remote servers, raising obvious risks of privacy breaches.

Confidential meeting recordings of business professionals and personal photos of ordinary people—once uploaded to the cloud, this data risks being leaked or misused. More importantly, in offline environments such as airplanes and subways, cloud-based AI functions become completely ineffective, failing to meet users’ immediate needs.

The rise of edge AI is the key to breaking this dilemma—all AI calculations are completed locally on the phone, and data closed-loop processing does not go to the cloud, which not only ensures privacy and security from the source, but also achieves the core advantage of offline usability. The implementation of all this depends on the computing power and energy efficiency of the chip’s NPU. The Dimensity 9500’s dual NPU architecture provides a perfect solution for this need.

As MediaTek’s new generation flagship chip, the Dimensity 9500 features a groundbreaking dual NPU architecture consisting of the high-performance NPU 990 and the high-efficiency NPU, providing solid support from the hardware level for the triple requirements of “high performance + low power consumption + high security” for edge AI.

Among them, the high-performance NPU 990 has a peak computing power that is 111% higher than the previous generation, and achieved an industry-leading score of over 15,000 points in the Zurich AI Benchmark. It can easily handle heavy AI tasks such as 4K high-definition text and image processing and multimodal content summarization.

Its integrated generative AI engine 2.0 is the first to support BitNet 1.58bit large model operations. Through dedicated solidified circuits and memory compression technology, it significantly reduces storage requirements while reducing power consumption at peak performance by 56%, achieving a breakthrough in energy efficiency by “doubling computing power and halving power consumption”.

This means that users can create 4K resolution AI paintings locally without an internet connection, generating high-definition images that meet their needs within 10 seconds; for long documents of tens of thousands of words or one-hour meeting recordings, structured summaries can be generated instantly, with all data stored locally, avoiding the risks of cloud transmission and completely eliminating dependence on the network.

Meanwhile, the Dimensity 9500’s high-efficiency NPU adopts an industry-leading in-memory computing architecture, reducing power consumption by 42% compared to traditional NPUs, and supporting AI models to remain running low-power all day. Combined with TSMC’s third-generation 3nm process technology, the chip’s NPU energy efficiency advantage is further enhanced. Compared to the previous generation chip, the Dimensity 9500’s NPU peak power consumption is reduced by 56%, allowing edge AI to achieve high performance while effectively avoiding overheating and battery life issues, clearing obstacles for the normalized and high-frequency use of AI functions.

Leveraging the powerful computing capabilities of the Dimensity 9500’s dual NPUs, terminal manufacturers are able to create edge AI security features across all scenarios, allowing users to enjoy smart convenience while achieving “zero upload” of privacy data.

For example, the OPPO Find X9 Pro, equipped with the Dimensity 9500, features a “one-click note-taking” function. Users can simply press the note-taking button to have their phones locally analyze the images and audio information from Bilibili videos and Xiaohongshu guides, quickly generating a summary of key viewpoints. The entire process does not require uploading to the cloud, thus avoiding the leakage of personal viewing preferences contained in video content and enabling efficient information organization even without a network connection.

The vivo X300 Pro, based on the on-device computing power of the Dimensity 9500, enables offline transcription of audio recordings and automatic title generation. Confidential conversations in business meetings can be organized locally, fundamentally eliminating the risk of information leakage.

Currently, the Dimensity 9500’s edge AI capabilities have gained deep recognition from leading mobile phone brands. OPPO, vivo and other manufacturers’ new generation flagship models have all deeply adapted to its dual NPU architecture, creating a unique and secure intelligent experience.

This joint optimization model of “chip + terminal” has formed a complete edge AI security ecosystem, from the underlying computing power supply to the upper-layer application implementation.

The Dimensity 9500 not only achieves a perfect balance between “intelligent experience” and “privacy and security,” becoming the core driving force for the development of edge AI in flagship mobile phones, but also promotes the entire industry to shift from “cloud dependence” to “edge autonomy,” leading the industry into a safer and smarter AI terminal era and accelerating the full entry of AI mobile phones into a new stage of “security and intelligence in tandem.”