Thirty dollars. That’s apparently what MediaTek’s next flagship chip was going for on a Chinese secondhand marketplace, months before anyone officially knows it exists. If that doesn’t grab your attention, nothing will.
According to Gizmochina, a seller on Xianyu, which is basically China’s version of eBay for tech bits and secondhand parts, listed two chips under the part numbers MT6993Z and MT6995Z. The first one is already confirmed as the Dimensity 9500. The second is generating serious buzz because, based on how MediaTek typically sequences its part numbers, it lines up with what many expect to be the Dimensity 9600 Pro. The listing offered both chips at just 200 yuan each, roughly $30, with free shipping if you bought two or more. The listing has since been pulled.
Photos from the post showed several loose BGA packages sitting in a sealed, hand-labeled bag, along with close-up shots of the individual chips. The seller described them as unencrypted engineering-grade samples sourced from teardown stock, said they were in good condition, and suggested they could be useful for motherboard repair or hardware expansion work. So these aren’t retail chips. They’re the kind of early-stage samples that circulate through supply chains before a product ever sees a stage announcement.
This same seller, worth noting, previously listed engineering samples of Qualcomm’s next-gen Snapdragon chipset. So this isn’t some random account stumbling into rare parts. There’s a pattern here, and it’s pointing toward a well-connected source with access to pre-production silicon.
Looking at the photos, the suspected Dimensity 9600 Pro appears to be roughly the same physical size as the Dimensity 9500, around 140 square millimeters. That puts it close to Qualcomm’s rumored next flagship die size of about 134 square millimeters. Closing that gap matters because a larger die generally means more real estate for transistors and performance headroom, but it also pushes up manufacturing costs. MediaTek has historically kept its pricing competitive, so how they balance that will be worth watching.
The packaging in the images looks like a traditional FCPoP design, similar to what the previous generation used. Whether that holds up thermally against whatever more refined packaging Qualcomm is expected to bring to its next flagship is still unknown. The silkscreen markings on the chips don’t reveal much, and MediaTek appears to have tweaked its usual encoding style, which makes independent analysis harder.
To be clear, none of this is verified by MediaTek. MT6993Z being the Dimensity 9500 is confirmed, but the MT6995Z-to-Dimensity-9600-Pro connection is still speculation. Still, engineering samples surfacing on the secondhand market is a meaningful signal. It means MediaTek’s next flagship chip has progressed far enough through development that physical units are being produced and, apparently, leaking out into the wild. The race between MediaTek and Qualcomm at the high end is already heating up, and this is just the opening act.