It’s been nearly 10 years since Arm had first announced the Armv8 architecture in October 2011, and it’s been a quite eventful decade of computing as the instruction set architecture saw increased adoption through the mobile space to the server space, and now starting to become common in the consumer devices market such as laptops and upcoming desktop machines. Throughout the years, Arm has evolved the ISA with various updates and extensions to the architecture, some important, some maybe glanced over easily.

As part of Arm’s Vision Day event, the company is announcing the first details of the company’s new Armv9 architecture, setting the foundation for what Arm hopes to be the computing platform for the next 300 billion chips in the next decade.
The big question that readers will likely be asking themselves is what exactly differentiates Armv9 to Armv8 to warrant such a large jump in the ISA nomenclature. Truthfully, from a purely ISA standpoint, v9 probably isn’t an as fundamental jump as v8 was over v7, which had introduced a completely different execution mode and instruction set with AArch64, which had larger microarchitectural ramifications over AArch32 such as extended registers, 64-bit virtual address spaces and many more improvements.