This week’s podcast: Ten years ago, Arm introduced its v8 architecture of its processor cores, which turned out to be a pretty big deal. The company just revealed v9. The announcement was light on details, but details were available if you just looked for them. Tirias analyst Kevin Krewell looked for them. We talk with him about what he found.

[FULL TRANSCRIPT AVAILABLE BELOW]

BRIAN SANTO: I’m Brian Santo, EE Times editor-in-chief. You’re listening to EE Times On Air, and this is your Weekly Briefing for the week ending April 9th.

Ten years ago, Arm introduced a major revision in the architecture of its processor cores. That upgrade propelled Arm down a path of phenomenal success. The company just announced its first new major architectural revision since then, which the company hopes will be good for another decade of expansion.

Arm’s actual announcement was a little light on details, but the company did make some details available, and we happen to know a guy who went through them. This week we examine Arm’s new roadmap for its next 10 years with Tirias analyst Kevin Krewell.

First, here’s a quick rundown of some of the top articles we have in EE Times this week.

*EE Times has been writing about the development of autonomous vehicles and assisted driving technology for some years now. The technology companies involved have been acting the way technology companies have always acted: They’re labeling everything they’re doing proprietary and keeping that information secret. That’s understandable in most circumstances for most products, but it’s completely not suitable behavior when making cars, which need to meet safety standards, but must also show how they meet the standards.

Global editor Junko Yoshida’s has a new article about how the companies that are developing new technology for cars are going to have to change their behavior.

*The Solar Winds data breach might have been the worst intelligence failure since 9/11, and that’s actually saying something. Preventing similar failures in the future will depend in part on companies and organizations reporting about security breaches. There’s a problem with reporting protocols, though, according to contributor Ann Thryft. Read her story on the web at eetimes.com.

*Another top story: Just a few weeks ago, Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, announced that the company was going to establish an independent foundry business. The move was surprising given the context – which is that the company is still trying to get past manufacturing difficulties at the 10 nanometer node. That would have been one of the most advanced IC manufacturing processes at the time had Intel remained on schedule.

When Gelsinger made his announcement about Intel Foundry Services, he said the company would soon provide details about commercializing its first 10 nanometer products, and that’s what Intel just did. The company announced it has already shipped about 200,000 Ice Lake processors. Ice Lake chips are the newest versions of the company’s highly successful Xeon processors. One of the biggest markets for Ice Lake will be data centers.

The next voice you hear belongs to Naveen Shenoy, Intel executive vice president and the general manager of the company’s Data Platforms Group, talking about the demands of data centers.

NAVEEN SHENOY: The data centers of the future will look very different from how they do today. They’ll be more distributed in size and location, built on both public and private clouds. Compute, storage, and memory will be increasingly disaggregated, leveraging pools of connected infrastructure. Security will be architected-in at the chip level. Flexibility will extend across hardware, software, applications and services, deployed as smaller units called microservices for the faster development time and time to value.

CPUs and XPUs will work closely together to solve increasingly complex problems across these distributed environments. And that is why, over the last several years, Intel has built an unmatched portfolio to deliver every component of intelligent silicon our customers need to move, store, and process data from CPUs to FPGAs, to AI processors, to GPUs, to Ethernet, to silicon photonics, and to software.

BRIAN SANTO: EE Times editor Sally Ward-Foxton runs down the features and performance of Ice Lake processors, and explains how Intel plans to support data centers and other customers with the new line.

You can find these and other stories when you visit our web site at eetimes.com. If you reached this episode through our podcast web page, there are links to all of these stories on your left.

Back in the 1980s, consumers knew the brand names of the computers they bought: IBM and Apple, Commodore and Compaq, Amstrad and Sinclair. The average consumer had never heard of the companies that made the microprocessors that were the engines enclosed in the cabinets of those still-mostly desktop machines – companies like Motorola, Zilog, MOS Technology. That changed in 1991 with Intel’s “Intel Inside” advertising campaign. Pretty soon, average consumers were talking about microprocessors the way their parents might have talked about car engines back in the 1960s. People became aware of what was under the hood.

Arm, today, is a little like Intel before 1991, in that the average consumer hasn’t heard of the company that almost certainly designed the processor in the smartphones that the majority of people on the planet have in their pockets or purses.

About 10 years ago, Arm introduced version 8 of its architecture. It was a fairly big deal. The company announced some key innovations for v8, and also plotted out a roadmap that built out on those innovations. The announcement, combined with the roadmap, built excitement around Arm’s processor cores, which the company rode to overwhelming dominance in the smartphone market, and to solid success in other markets such as automotive and the Internet of Things, among others.

Recently, the company held a virtual conference and introduced version 9 of its architecture. No one can doubt that Arm wants the introduction of v9 to be as big of a deal as the introduction of v8 a decade ago. Arm was a little light on details about v9, but to be fair, it was a little light on details back in 2011 on v8, too.

Kevin Krewell is a principal analyst with Tirias Research. He’s an engineer who in the past has worked at Nvidia and AMD, and he’s been a regular guest on this podcast. We know he knows his stuff. If anyone was going to ferret out whatever details there were about Arm v9, it was going to be our old pal Kevin. I called him up earlier this week to see what he was able to unearth about Arm v9.

What details were you able to ferret out that suggest the differences between v8 and v9?

KEVIN KREWELL: Using my technology and analyst skills, I dug deep into their web site.

BRIAN SANTO: You bloodhound, you!

KEVIN KREWELL: Actually, there are lots of details on the Arm developer web site developer.arm.com going into and breaking it down in a little more detail. Arm was forthcoming about the fact that this was a “vision” that they were laying out for the architecture for v9.

V8 was a huge change for Arm. That introduced the 64-bit extensions to Arm. That was a massive change for the Arm architecture from 32-bit now to 64-bit and 32-bit compatible. So it’s really hard for Arm to follow up with that. Arm v9 (and in this case, just specifically the A profile, which is the cortex A, a line used in smartphones and servers and such). There are some big changes in there, but maybe not quite a big change as it was from 7 to 8. And in fact, what I found going through the web site is that a lot of the features that are showing up in Arm 9.0 and 9.1 will also be back-ported to future versions of the Arm 8 architecture.

Some of the stuff is exclusive to Arm 9, but there’s a lot that they mentioned in the vision conference that is also going to be available on Arm v8. So they’re not necessarily making everything exclusive to Arm v9.

The things that are exclusive to Arm v9 include Salable Vector Extension 2 (SVE-2), which is now a variable with vector extension, instead of the SVE-1, which was used in the supercomputer from Japan. But SVE-2 is more dynamic in terms of its variable width. So it will scale from lower end to higher end solutions. Transactional memory extension, which is used for writing highly parallel code, making it run more efficiently. I think that will show up mostly in servers. Something called Branch Record Buffered Extension. That’s coming later for the Arm v9 instruction, but it captures branches and allows it better debugging. And then something that they really focused heavily on, which is this realm management platform. There are extensions to that for confidential computing. And that’s going to come sometime in the future. So that’s actually not going to be available in the Arm 9.0 release. But the realm security management extensions are Arm’s attempt to really go in to enterprise class of computing platforms with an even higher level of security. So I think that’s one of their big separators. And that will be available in 9, but not back-portable to v8.

BRIAN SANTO: These are not insignificant technological advances. Some of them are very significant. But they’re not a clear break, like 32-bit to 64-bit. They’re spread across v8 and v9. But it sounds as if they’re signaling that, moving forward, they’re going to have a set of features and a direction that will support a new set of applications or one that they haven’t been as successful in: that enterprise area that you just mentioned before. Might that be a reasonable way to look at what Arm’s doing?

KEVIN KREWELL: I believe so, yeah. They’re moving the architecture forward, and I think that’s another reason to use the increment, the numbering scheme. There are definitions for Arm v8 up to Arm v8.7 on their web site with details. And some of the stuff like B-Floyd 16, which is used for machine learning applications, and that’s going to be in 8.6. High-precision timers. There’s a number of features. Generalized matrix multiplication, GMM. That’s in 8.6 as well. But that will also be in 9.1. So there are a number of overlaps, and I think these are high-performance compute functions that could be back-portable to 8. But when you start talking about “enterprise class,” I think Arm wanted to elevate the architecture to another level. And I think that by going from v8 to v9, they’re signaling that the Arm architecture is evolving to another level.

So I think the target markets here are high-performance computing applications and also enterprise class computing applications. And I think the security features, the scalable vector extensions give you more high performance compute on the platform. The transactional memory is another unique feature that can be useful in increasing performance in data center applications. So I think they are elevating the architecture to a new level and to bring it into direct competition and compatibility with enterprise class security, enterprise class computing.

BRIAN SANTO: These are some of the extensions paralleling what some of their competitors are doing in the same area.

KEVIN KREWELL: The goal here in the enterprise class is to compete with Intel Xeon, AMD Epic and even IBM Power. They’re bringing the architecture up to that level of performance and security. Arm has evolved over the years, and I think it wants to be considered a first-class architecture to any other architecture in the data center. And I think this is their play for that. This is their movement into that arena.

BRIAN SANTO: With the performance improvements… They’ve always hit on their ambition to get into those areas with the thinking that their expertise in low-power processing seemed to fit hand in glove with what data centers wanted, but perhaps they might not have had the horsepower with their processors before. And perhaps also they might not have had a clear roadmap for where they were going with performance improvements, which data centers love to see. And it looks like they’re providing both with this transition to 9.

KEVIN KREWELL: Yeah. Initially, the focus on power efficiency is a holdover from their smartphone and tablet business. Power efficiency was their dominant theme. But then with the advent of neoverse set of cores, and even the Arm X1 core, they have really moved to step up performance as a lead feature. Still power efficient, but more on the performance side, not just necessarily performance per watt. Just to accelerate that.

Part of it is, I think the competition from even Arm licensees like Apple, was done with very performant cores within the Arm architecture, that they would like to offer something from the standard Arm core that would be comparable to what Apple has developed. Qualcomm has bought Nuvia to also step up its performance to compete with Apple.

The cores themselves have now moved from just power efficient to performance, still with power efficiency. Then adding all these other features, security features, that are required for enterprise class. One thing we can’t forget is that Nvidia is trying to buy Arm at this point in time. So Nvidia’s focus and Arm’s focus are now coming into alignment. Nvidia’s focused on enterprise, it’s focused on AI, it’s focused on high-performance compute. So now we’re seeing a further alignment of the corporate goals of Arm and the corporate goals of Nvidia prior to an acquisition taking place. So I think that also could be part of the push for this Arm v9 at this point in time.

BRIAN SANTO: We’ve talked a little bit about performance. We’ve talked a little bit about the AI. Is there anything more about those before we move on to a couple of the other points that Arm CEO Simon Segars was hitting on at the introduction? He was talking about confidential computing and IoT security. Before we move to those, anything else about AI or performance?

KEVIN KREWELL: One of the things that Arm is doing is rolling out AI-performant features throughout the entire Arm cortex family. That’s important because, actually I’m a believe that AI workloads are going to be prevalent in everything, from microcontrollers all the way up to servers. So therefore, having some level of AI acceleration in your CPUs and your GPUs and your DSPs and other accelerators is going to be one of the megatrends for CPU architecture and architecture going forward.

Intel’s doing it with DL Boost, their architecture. You’re going to see other architectures step up. Certainly RISC-V is adding their own vector extensions as well and focused on AI. So Arm is joining this wave of AI everywhere. So I see that as an important part of V9 as well.

BRIAN SANTO: So AI everywhere. That is a conceptual leap to the next thing, which is security everywhere. They were talking about confidential computing, and they were also talking about IoT security. And the two things are different. I have an intuitive grasp of why, but I’m wondering if I could get you to give up a sense of where confidential computing fits and where IoT security…. where those two things diverge from each other.

KEVIN KREWELL: In many ways, they’re all similar. You want to keep your data encrypted and safe. In confidential computing, it’s important that the data in a data center (whether it’s in a virtual machine or running on bare metal), the data at rest, the data in storage and the data in compute, in movement, is all protected. In fact, that’s part of the goal of confidential computing. AMD’s involved in it; IBM’s involved in it; Intel’s involved in it. It’s a major data center and enterprise class standard going forward to make sure that all the data is protected no matter where it is and what you’re doing to it.

On the IoT side, you see that, but on-the-fly encryption/decryption or working on encrypted data is a little more complicated, a little harder to do. So there, mood of trust is important. The communication… almost all the IoT or edge devices have to communicate back to a host of some sort. And in transaction, that communication of data, that needs to be protected along the way. So I see it a little bit different: You don’t necessarily have to worry about large data files on an IoT device, but you need the fact that the communication links in and out of the device and the boot are all protected.

But in a data center, the data in flight and transaction on a data path within the data center need to be protected as well. Little more detail, a little more deeper level of security.

BRIAN SANTO: It’s really easy for gearheads to get attracted to the performance numbers, to the number of transistors, to whether this is implemented in chiplets or not. But the security and the confidential computing… do they actually show up as an “architectural” feature? Either way, it seems like neither of these is unimportant. It just that they don’t seem to have a clear physical engineering implementation yet.

KEVIN KREWELL: Going back to the v9, the first silicon implementation of v9 is supposed to come out later this year. And I believe Media Tech is going to be one of the first that’s out. So what I assume is, it’s going to be a performant core with probably SVE-2 on it. Actually, this is one of the big differences from Arm now. The last time when they talked about v8, when they released it, we didn’t see silicon for a while. I don’t remember exactly, but the first actual implementation of 64 bit was the Apple A series, ahead of everybody else. Arm itself didn’t even have a 64-bit core when Apple released their 64-bit core.

This is different now. Again, this is a vision conference, so they didn’t release an Arm v9 core at the conference. They didn’t announce any. But I expect there is one, and it’s in the hands of Media Tech right now. So we will find out more detail probably in the next few months as some other announcements are made.

Arm is moving much faster now than it had in the past. So this announcement… we’ll see silicon later this year. Whether it’s broken up into chiplets or not, that doesn’t necessarily affect the architecture per se, but the other thing that Arm talked about was accelerating innovation in areas like Mali, their graphics core. You could see a chiplet structure with a Mali core and an Arm v9 core. You can do it in chiplets, or you can do it in a full SoC. You can do it either way. That may be something we’ll see more of in the future, but it wasn’t specifically tied to this announcement. That’s one of the things we may see going forward, breaking these things up into chunks where parts are going to be implemented in different process nodes or just by different foundries and then glued together in the package.

One interesting thing about the Intel announcement is that their foundry plan includes Arm cores. You could go to Intel for Arm as well.

BRIAN SANTO: That was almost shocking! Right?

KEVIN KREWELL: Well, yeah. Arm and RISC-V are both IP that Intel will be supporting in their foundry program. As well as X86. It would be crazy: You can mix X86, Arm and RISC-V all in one design.

BRIAN SANTO: And you’re just the guy to do it! Just because.

KEVIN KREWELL: Just turn on the blender and blend it all together.

BRIAN SANTO: You should sell that to the EDA companies. “Stop calling it what you’re calling it; call it a blender.”

KEVIN KREWELL: Yes.

BRIAN SANTO: All right! Now that we’ve got trademarks settled, Kevin, thank you so much for your time today. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

KEVIN KREWELL: And you, too, Brian. It’s always fun.

BRIAN SANTO: That was Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research.

We invite you to keep reading EE Times and listening to this podcast for ongoing coverage of processor technology, data center innovations, and of course we’ll keep tabs on the intended merger of Nvidia and Arm.

And that is it for the Weekly Briefing for the week ending April 9th. Thank you for listening.

The Weekly Briefing is available on all the major podcast platforms, but if you get to us via our web site at eetimes.com/podcasts you’ll find a transcript along with links to the stories we mentioned.

This podcast is produced by EE Times. It was Engineered by Taylor Marvin and Greg McRae at Coupe Studios. The Segment Producer was Kaitie Huss.

I’m Brian Santo. See you next week.

* * * * *

[Hidden track]

BRIAN SANTO: Oh, yeah!

KEVIN KREWELL: We’re here!

BRIAN SANTO: We’re live!

KEVIN KREWELL: Well, we’re Memorex.

BRIAN SANTO: Wow! When was the last time you actually held something on Memorex tape in your hands?

KEVIN KREWELL: I may still have a Memorex tape somewhere in my pile of crap.

BRIAN SANTO: Wow! I wonder if any… Yeah, old guys talking about bygone technology. “Hey, Kevin, what about your icebox? Remember working with the ice man?”

(LAUGHTER)

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