Arm announces 'Armv9' their next generation processor architecture

[Polycount]

In context: Arm might not have the same consumer desktop presence as Intel or AMD, but when it comes to smartphones, servers, and even new MacBooks, the company's processor architecture is essentially unmatched. Despite its ubiquitousness, though, the Arm architecture hasn't seen any massive, generational upgrades since v8, released way back in October 2011.

That's about to change, though. The semiconductor firm has officially unveiled Armv9, heralding a new era of processor architecture that seeks to meet growing computational demand in the fields of data security and artificial intelligence.

Focusing on the latter first, Arm CEO Simon Segars says Armv9 is the "answer" to a future that will be "defined by AI." To face that inevitability head-on, Segars claims his company needs to lay a foundation of "leading-edge compute" capabilities.

How, exactly? The Scalable Vector Extension (SVE). For those who don't know, the SVE is the technology at the heart of the world's fastest supercomputer, Fugaku. Arm has partnered with its creator, Fujitsu, to develop SVE2 for Armv9. In theory, SVE2 should enable next-gen machine learning and digital signal processing capabilities.

As for how v9 will tackle security, you need only look to Arm's new Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA). The company describes CCA's functionality as follows:

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.

Through the CCA, and something called "dynamically created Realms," Armv9 will be able to protect sensitive data from prying eyes while it's actively in use, "at rest," or being transferred to another location.

Last, but certainly not least, Armv9 shoots for massive CPU performance gains of over 30 percent. Arm expects those improvements to be finalized over the "next two generations" of mobile and server CPUs.

Arm hopes all of these generational upgrades will put its architecture on track to process "100 percent of the world's shared data" in at least some capacity -- whether it's at the "endpoint" or somewhere in the cloud.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/89137-arm-announces-v9-next-generation-processor-architecture.html

 

[psycros]

A friend of mine held the patent on what is essentially CCA for 20 years. Nobody would pay him even the extremely modest licensing fee he was asking (he would probably have never have gotten rich - he just wanted to be appreciated for his designs). And so that kind of security technology stagnated for two decades. Within two weeks of his patent expiring every major chip maker had submitted their own slight alterations of his work to patent offices throughout the free world. When you wonder why something hasn't been done yet even though the technical capability is clearly there, the answer is always corporate greed.

 

[BadThad]

A friend of mine held the patent on what is essentially CCA for 20 years. Nobody would pay him even the extremely modest licensing fee he was asking (he would probably have never have gotten rich - he just wanted to be appreciated for his designs). And so that kind of security technology stagnated for two decades. Within two weeks of his patent expiring every major chip maker had submitted their own slight alterations of his work to patent offices throughout the free world. When you wonder why something hasn't been done yet even though the technical capability is clearly there, the answer is always corporate greed.

"Corporate greed"? Why are businesses in business? To lose money? Obviously, you have no knowledge of how to run a business and, apparently, have not worked for a business you care at all about. SAD!

 

[hwertz]

"Corporate greed"? Why are businesses in business? To lose money? Obviously, you have no knowledge of how to run a business and, apparently, have not worked for a business you care at all about. SAD!

Yep, corporate greed. Businesses are in business to make money, but it's possible to make a quality products at a fair price and make money; or, you can view your customers as "consumers" and try to hoover up every penny possible, both are legitimate business practices but one is greedy and one isn't. You're view is outdated, a business that makes it clear they are there just to maximize their profits, will now have their customers move off to a business that treats their customers better.

That said... on my computer, the privileged code on the system is a fully functional Linux kernel deciding what should run, when it should run, what permissions it should have, and successfully isolating each process from the others. I do not need bits of code running on my system outside control of the operating system, thank you very much! (Usually the uses for this have been DRM -- digital rights restrictions -- where the movie and TV companies have this fantasy that they can prevent you from copying their stuff through increasingly elaborate but ineffective means; and limited use in things like slot machines, to secure bits of code that can verify the rest of the code has not been tampered with.)