Yesterday, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 surfaced on Geekbench, which was our first brush with ARM’s new prime core. It’s codenamed “Travis” and no, it wasn’t operating at 4GHz, simply 3.23GHz. Travis shouldn’t be official but, however leakster Digital Chat Station reviews that will probably be unveiled in September.
The important thing metric for flagship chips will turn out to be IPC, “directions per clock cycle”, in keeping with DCS. This will spell the tip of the gigahertz race on cell. The best rationalization of IPC is {that a} CPU with double the IPC wants half the clock velocity to do the identical quantity of labor. Actuality shouldn’t be so easy, however that’s the rule of thumb.
Travis will ship “double-digit development” in IPC (measured in p.c), which can permit it to run extra effectively. Do not forget that larger clock speeds require a better core voltage and warmth technology goes up because the sq. of the voltage – that means that even small variations can have a huge impact.
The Travis core additionally helps SME, ARM’s Scalable Matrix Extension. Matrix and vector calculations are the center of all stylish AI functions, but in addition nearly each basic sign processing algorithm (assume picture and audio processing).
In addition to a single Travis core, the Dimensity 9500 can even be geared up with three Alto and 4 Gelas cores (Gelas being the following Cortex-A7xx core, whereas Alto is a little bit of a thriller). The GPU is a brand new design from ARM codenamed “Drage”, which will probably be bought beneath the “Mali-G1” branding.
You may take a look at the ARM presentation from Computex 2025 right here, particularly the part titled “A sneak peek of next-generation ARM Lumex CSS” (Compute Sub-System).
PS. ARM is retiring the “Cortex” model and can break up it into a number of branches: “Lumex” for cell, “Niva” for PC, “Zena” for automotive, “Neoverse” for servers and “Orbis” for IoT.