ARMs Race | ARMv9 to deliver ray tracing and massive performance

In today’s world computers are powered by diverse chip architectures with Windows, macOS, Chrome OS and Linux all running on both x86 and ARM chips. Windows 10 and macOS are currently running on x86 chips from Intel and AMD while both Microsoft and Apple are also pouring additional resources into moving to ARM to varying degrees. In the mobile world, all smartphones are powered by the ARM architecture. So when ARM announces a major advancement in architecture, the world sits up and take notice.

Ray Tracing & Variable Rate Shading

Today, ARM announced that both Ray Tracing and Variable Rate Shading capabilities will now be available not only on ARM powered PC’s but to tablets and smartphones, which marks ARMv9 as the architecture that will power the next decade of next-gen devices. Ray Tracing and Variable Rate Shading only became available to consumers in 2020 with the release of consoles such as Xbox Series X and Nvidia’s RTX GPU’s, so to see this experience enhancing tech so soon and in such small packages is nothing short of astounding.

ARM said that chips with the v8 architecture will be released this year with a 30% performance boost to the current v8 architecture chips on the market today.

Next-gen AI powered by SVE2

ARMv9 also includes new AI enhancing tech called SVE2. The new instruction set will be used for enhanced image processing like portrait mode and other effects.

Realms Virtual Machine protection for ARM PCs

ARMv9 will also include a hardware container for Virtual Machines and other secure applications optimized to take advantage of the added security Realms delivers to ARM PCs.

Next-Gen ARM PCs

“What’s great about all of this CPU and system performance, is that it applies equally to notebook performance, as it does to mobile performance,” said Peter Greenhalgh, vice-president of technology at Arm. Everyone from Qualcomm, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and others will benefit from these performance gains and could make the Qualcomm 8cx Gen3 and Apple M1 chips look slow by comparison.