Leading semiconductor design company Arm Limited took the virtual COMPUTEX 2021 opening keynote stage and highlighted on the major upgrades of its latest processor architecture Armv9, which Chief Executive Officer Simon Segars said would dwell on the company’s new approach to critical capabilities namely security, computer efficiency, protecting future artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled services, and fighting climate change. 

For its enterprise endeavors, Arm highlighted the reinforced capabilities of its Neoverse line of central processing unit (CPU) microarchitectures to help enterprises not just achieve the desired compute power but also promote energy efficiency.

Tackles Security Threats

In his keynote speech, Segars said the ARMv9 CPU architecture will serve as the foundation of the company’s Total Compute Strategy and would ensure holistic system approach to SoC design to ensure solutions can seamlessly and securely handle complex and compute intensive workloads. 

“(Armv9) was the result of a long-term investment. We spent more than 10 years of R&D (research and development) so our partners can accelerate the development of new solutions based on new capabilities. We have focused on scale, solving those big challenges around security and efficiency and working to help you get to market faster so (customers) can unlock new opportunities,” said Segars. 

The Armv9’s confidential compute architecture, Segars explained, is anchored on Technology Realms and Memory Tagging Extensions, the key features of the Armv9 to ensure data are protected from any cybercrime threats, losses for which, he said, is expected at US$6 trillion in 2021. Cyberthreats, he noted, are now turning to IoT devices. 

Energy-Efficient Compute Power

Arm has been working with engineering teams to optimize designs and change the landscape of cloud computing. Segars underscored the collaboration it had with its partners through the years, citing at present, around 70 percent of world population are using devices containing Arm technology. This, he said, puts a lot of responsibility for Arm to help its partner companies not just to achieve compute efficiency but also help fight climate change, the reason why the company is espousing Decarbonizing Compute. 

“As the complexity and scale of compute become higher, we found ourselves responsible in meeting our customers’ performance expectation while maintaining our pledge to the environment. That’s why we recently introduced Neoverse N2, which will delivery 40 percent more compute performance while keeping power consumption constant,” said Segars. 

Neoverse N2, which uses Armv9 CPU, offers best-in-class performance, efficiency, and compute density, while maintaining the cloud native experience. It offers significant 40 percent performance increase over the Neoverse N1 CPU along with industry-leading power and area efficiency, and single-thread performance for scale-out cloud and 5G applications.