Arm's new chip architecture will power future devices, possibly including Apple's

Arm's new v9 architecture boosts AI, security, and performance

Chip designer Arm Ltd. has announced its new v9 architecture, a design that could eventually appear in the Apple Silicon powering future iPhones, iPads, and Macs.

The new Arm v9 focuses on three areas: performance, security, and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Arm says the design will provide more than a 30% CPU performance boost over the next two generations of mobile and infrastructure CPUs.

AI is another critical area Arm targeted with its v9 design. The architecture's new Scalable Vector Extension 2 (SVE2) technology will enhance ML and digital signal processing (DSP) for future devices.

Arm's SCE2 can improve processing for 5G systems, ML, voice AI assistants, and virtual and augmented reality. Apple's Arm-based chips include a Neural Engine that handles ML tasks, and the company is reportedly developing a mixed-reality headset and AR glasses.

Security is the third pillar of Arm's new design. Its Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) "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."

The CCA will use a concept called Realms, a "region that is separate from both the secure and non-secure worlds." For example, Arm says a business application could use Realms to protect sensitive data from the rest of the system "while it is in-use, at rest, and in transit."

Apple's M1 chip, powering the latest Macs, uses an Arm design

ARM says that the first devices using the v9 design will arrive by late 2021.

Chips based on the decade-old v8 design offer the best performance-per-watt in computing today. Arm-based chips power nearly every smartphone, along with many tablets and an increasing number of laptops.

Apple Silicon, which uses an Arm v8-based design, will soon power every Apple computing product. All iPhones and iPads use Apple Silicon chips, and the company is in a two-year transition that will end with all Macs running Apple's Arm-based silicon. The Arm-based M1 chip powers the latest MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.

Nvidia is in the process of buying Arm Ltd. for a record-breaking $40 billion.

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74 Comments

rob53

said about 3 years ago

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed.

As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them.

melgross

said about 3 years ago

rob53 said:

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed.
As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them.

No. The architectural license Apple has allows them to design their own cores, which they do. They don’t have to give anyone anything from that work.

mjtomlin

said about 3 years ago

rob53 said:

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed.
As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them.

They are not. All that is required is that Apple's implementation of ARM's v8 ISA remains backwards compatible with the v8 specs. Other than that, Apple is allowed to extend the ISA as needed and they are not required to push those extensions back to ARM.

cloudguy

said about 3 years ago

Wait what? I thought Apple was an ARM Holdings co-founder, had a permanent architectural license and their own custom design for PCs that was radically different from - and better than - the small core design for embedded systems that the ARM pushes for Cortex-A for smartphones and the somewhat better (but still not very good) Marvell and N1 core designs that are used on servers (which again aren't very good as they constitute 3% of the market, forcing Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc. to also make their own core designs and causing Marvell, HP and most other ARM server vendors to drop out of the market leaving Ampere as the only player)? Even Fujitsu, who makes ARM supercomputers, relies on a custom design (a combination of the RISC license based on SPARC that they bought from Sun back in the day and things they licensed from ARM).

While the M1 chip has a single core score that rivals Intel Core i7 and i9, the best Cortex Core for PCs and mobile barely surpasses the Intel Pentium. (Qualcomm is hyping up the multicore score, but even there it takes 8 performance cores to merely rival the Geekbench 5 score for the quad core Intel i5). I thought that Apple having their own big core design that ARM Holdings can't come close to was why Nvidia's purchase of ARM Holdings is like "meh" for Apple as their custom CPU and GPU designs are much better - by several times - than Cortex, Mali (the ARM Holdings GPU) and even Nvidia (either their old GPU architecture or their new Ampere one) anyway.

cloudguy

said about 3 years ago

rob53 said:

Is Apple required to push their Apple developed ARM designs back to the main ARM design architecture? It appears v9 will include many of the ideas Apple has developed.
As for Nvidia buying Arm Ltd there better be a whole lot more investigation into how Nvidia will be allowed to control the architecture and its users before they’re allowed to buy them.

You are wrong on both counts.

1. The v9 contains things that ARM developed independently that are inferior to Apple's tech.
2. Apple WILL NOT be required to push their ARM designs back. First off, as a co-founder with a permanent architectural license, Apple is for all intents and purposes an independent entity here. Second, even if they weren't, the other ARM licensees like MediaTek, Huawei, Qualcomm and Samsung don't either. This is a real issue because for awhile both Samsung and Qualcomm were able to develop custom CPU cores that were significantly better tham ARM's generic CPU cores. (Samsung fell behind and gave up; Qualcomm's are only slightly better.) And Qualcomm's Adreno GPU design is MUCH BETTER than ARM Holdings' Mali. (The bad ARM GPUs are a major reason why Google uses Intel for Chromebooks. Samsung ditched Mali for an AMD GPU design. Nvidia's mobile GPU design - hardware and software - is much better also.) So if generic licensees like Qualcomm, Samsung and Nvidia aren't required to give up their IP to ARM Holdings there is no way that Apple - whose license is on far better terms - won't.

Basically Nvidia buying ARM has nothing to do with Apple. Nvidia doesn't even want in on the CPU game anyway. They tried that already: they made CPUs for the original batch of Android devices. When companies abandoned them for the Qualcomm/Samsung/MediaTek trio they tried to manufacture and sell their own devices - the Nvidia Shield tablet and the Nvidia Shield set top box - but that failed also. Even the Nintendo Switch uses Nvidia CPU designs that are like 4 years old because Nvidia exited that market and never updated them. The Nintendo Switch Pro will have a slightly updated Tegra CPU, but it still won't use the latest ARM cores or the latest process. Nvidia buying ARM is all about cloud, edge and IoT stuff plus ML/AI stuff, and those are areas that an end user consumer hardware company like Apple only dabbles in.