Yesterday, MediaTek’s Dimensity 9500 surfaced on Geekbench, which was our first brush with ARM’s new prime core. It is codenamed “Travis” and no, it wasn’t running at 4GHz, just 3.23GHz. Travis is not official yet, but leakster Digital Chat Station reports that it will be unveiled in September.
The key metric for flagship chips will become IPC, “instructions per clock cycle”, according to DCS. This may spell the end of the gigahertz race on mobile. The simplest explanation of IPC is that a CPU with double the IPC needs half the clock speed to do the same amount of work. Reality is not so simple, but that is the rule of thumb.
Travis will deliver “double-digit growth” in IPC (measured in percent), which will allow it to run more efficiently. Remember that higher clock speeds require a higher core voltage and heat generation goes up as the square of the voltage – meaning that even small differences can have a big impact.
The Travis core also supports SME, ARM’s Scalable Matrix Extension. Matrix and vector calculations are the heart of all trendy AI applications, but also just about every classic signal processing algorithm (think image and audio processing).
Besides a single Travis core, the Dimensity 9500 will also be equipped with three Alto and four Gelas cores (Gelas being the next Cortex-A7xx core, while Alto is a bit of a mystery). The GPU is a new design from ARM codenamed “Drage”, which will be sold under the “Mali-G1” branding.
You can check out the ARM presentation from Computex 2025 here, specifically the section titled “A sneak peek of next-generation ARM Lumex CSS” (Compute Sub-System).
PS. ARM is retiring the “Cortex” brand and will split it into several branches: “Lumex” for mobile, “Niva” for PC, “Zena” for automotive, “Neoverse” for servers and “Orbis” for IoT.