The Cortex-A77 CPU design is ultimately a refinement of last year's 7-nanometer A76, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The new hardware claims 20 percent faster instructions-per-clock performance without hurting efficiency, and that translates to roughly 35 times faster machine learning performance than the old A55 (for context, ARM was celebrating a 28-fold boost in February).

As with any ARM design, just when you'll see these in shipping products will depend on chip manufacturers like Qualcomm, Samsung and others implementing the technology in processors. Likewise, don't be surprised if the exact performance gains vary sharply from chip to chip, not to mention device to device. Whatever you get, it's safe to presume that A77-based phones will feel tangibly faster.