The design should be more miserly across the board, too. It uses about 75 percent less energy than its A15 ancestor when it's at a similar performance level, and even the graphics use about 40 percent less power. And as you might expect, it's built to take advantage of both ARM's established big.LITTLE tech (which switches to lower-power CPU cores for lighter workloads) and 64-bit platforms like Android 5.0 Lollipop.

You'll have to be patient if you want to try any of this first-hand, though. Huawei (HiSilicon), MediaTek and Rockchip have already signed up to make A72-based processors, but ARM doesn't expect the first shipping hardware until sometime in 2016. This is more of a preview of what's possible than anything else. It's up to chip and phone builders to translate what ARM has made into something you'll appreciate, whether you're making 4K home movies or playing intensive shoot-em-ups.