Arm introduced the Armv9 architecture in response to the global demand for ubiquitous specialized processing with increasingly capable security and artificial intelligence (AI). Armv9 is the first new Arm architecture in a decade, building on the success of Armv8. The new capabilities in Armv9 are designed to accelerate the move from general-purpose to more specialized compute across every application as AI, the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G gain momentum globally. To address the greatest technology challenge today – securing the world's data – the Armv9 roadmap introduces the Arm Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA). Confidential computing shields portions of code and data from access or modification while in-use, even from privileged software, by performing computation in a hardware-based secure environment.

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. It's an important milestone for the company, whose designs power almost every smartphone sold today, as well as increasing numbers of laptops and even servers. Apple announced its Mac computers' transition to its own Arm-based processors last year, and its first Apple Silicon Macs released later in the year. Other manufacturers like Microsoft have also released Arm-based laptops in recent years.

Arm, the leader in chips used in everything from mobile devices to supercomputers, has unveiled Armv9, the company's first major architectural change in a decade. The new designs should result in 30% faster performance over the next two chip generations. Arm is a chip architecture company that licenses its designs to others, and its customers have shipped more than 100 billion chips in the past five years. Nvidia is in the midst of acquiring Cambridge, United Kingdom-based Arm for $40 billion, but the deal is waiting on regulatory approvals. In a press briefing, Arm CEO Simon Segars said Armv9 will be the base for the next 300 billion Arm-based chips.

Arm said Tuesday that ray tracing and variable rate shading will migrate from the PC to Arm-powered smartphones and tablets as part of Armv9, the next-generation CPU architecture that the company expects will power the next decade of Arm devices. Chips based upon the v9 architecture will be released in 2021, providing an estimated 30-percent improvement in performance over the next two Arm chip generations and the devices that run them. Arm's v9 will also add SVE2, new AI-specific instructions that will probably be used for the AI image processing used on smartphones, such as portrait mode. Arm v9 will also include what Arm is calling Realms, a hardware container of sorts specifically designed to protect virtual machines and secure applications. As an intellectual-property licensing company, Arm enjoys a unique position in the computing industry.