Feature	Description	Armv9-A	Armv8-A	Armv7-A
AArch32	The 32-bit execution environment for the Arm architecture.	Yes (EL0 only)	Yes	Yes
AArch64	AArch64 is the 64-bit execution environment for the Arm architecture.	Yes	Yes	No
Neon (Advanced SIMD)	Neon technology is a packed SIMD architecture. Neon considers registers as vectors of elements of the same data type, with instructions operating on multiple elements simultaneously.	Yes	Yes	Yes
SVE	SVE provides support for SIMD with variable vector lengths. SVE enables vector length agnostic coding style.	SVE2	SVE	No
SME	SME extends SVE2, providing improved throughput and efficiency for matrix operations.	From Armv9.2	No	No
General Matrix Multiply (GEMM)	Neon and SVE instructions to accelerate matrix operations, greatly reducing the number of memory accesses required.	From Armv9.1	From Armv8.6	No
BFloat16	Support in Neon and SVE for BFloat16 data type.	From Armv9.1	From Armv8.6	No
Virtualization	Support for hypervisors and virtualization	Yes	Yes	Yes
Virtualization Host Extension (VHE)	Enhancements to improve the performance of Type 2 hypervisors by reducing the software overhead associated when transitioning between the Host and Guest operating systems	Yes	From Armv8.1	No
Nested virtualization	Improved support for nested virtualization.	Yes	From Armv8.3	No
TrustZone	TrustZone offers an efficient, system-wide approach to security with hardware-enforced isolation built into the CPU. Learn more.	Yes	Yes	Yes
Virtualization in Secure state	Support for virtualization in Secure state.	Yes	From Armv8.4	No
Realm Management Extension (RME)	RME builds on TrustZone enabling Arm Confidential Compute (Arm CCA) and Dynamic TrustZone.	From Armv9.1	No	No
Pointer Authentication	PAC allows software to sign pointers to improve control flow protection.	Yes	From Armv8.3	No
PAN	PAN allows kernels to prevent access to unprivileged locations, providing increased robustness.	Yes	From Armv8.1	No
Branch Target Identification (BTI)	BTI allows software to identify valid targets for in-direct branches.	Yes	From Armv8.5	No
Memory Tagging Extension (MTE)	Memory tagging enables developers to identify memory safety violations in their programs.	Yes	From Armv8.5	No
TME	TME brings Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) support to the Arm architecture	Yes	No	No
Trace	Support for non-invasively recording execution history.	ETE and TRBE	ETM	ETM
Branch Record Buffer	Allows capturing a recent sequence of branches in an easily consumable format.	From Armv9.2	No	No
Statistical Profiling Extension (SPE)	provides a non-invasive method of sampling software and hardware using randomized sampling.	Yes	From Armv8.2	No

Popular Community posts