Chip designer Arm has announced Armv9, its first new chip architecture in a decade following Armv8 way back in 2011. According to Arm, Armv9 offers three major improvements over the previous architecture: security, better AI performance, and faster performance in general. These benefits should eventually trickle down to devices with processors based on Arm’s designs.
ARMv9 includes the company’s new Confidential Compute Architecture, or CCA for short. It will enable a new “Realms” concept. ARM says all apps will have the opportunity to leverage Realms to protect their code and any private data they’re processing by executing in a different environment from other software.
ARMv9 chips will also feature the latest version of the company’s Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) technology. Developed with help from Fujitsu, it’s one of the technologies in use by the world’s fastest supercomputer. The company says its new SVE2 platform will give ARMv9 chips an edge when processing 5G, machine learning, and virtual and augmented reality workloads locally on their CPU.
And when it comes to raw computing power, ARM claims v9 will enable performance increases of more than 30 percent over the next generations of mobile and cloud CPUs, thanks, in part due to its Total Compute design philosophy.
ARM didn’t say when the first ARMv9 chips will arrive in the hands of consumers, but the company is bullish about its prospects. It says v9 will power 300 billion new ARM-based chips. At the rate ARM chips are being shipped at the moment, the company estimates 100 percent of all the world’s shared data will soon be processed by ARM chips, whether that’s on an individual device or in the cloud.
