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ARM: The Non-Evil Monopolist
yootje writes "ZDNet is running an article about ARM, a chip-maker who controls more than 80% of the cell phone market and 40% of the digital camera market. ARM shipped 780,000,000 processors last year. ZDNet finds it strange that no one seems to have anything against this company. And maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"
Why should I have anything against the company that makes the processor in my GBA? :D
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Maybe their lack of problems comes from the fact that they don't employ sumbarine patents, price fixing, coercion or collusion to keep their position in the market.
They just make a product that's good for its intended purpose and let the marketplace decide.
If only more companies would follow that lead, this would be a better world.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
ARM Sucks!!! jk. Who the hell cares? Does one have a choice? Cell phones work. We bitch when they don't work.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I didn't know ARM "shipped" any processors at all.
Being a monopoly isn't illegal
Using your monopoly position in illegal anticompetitive ways however, is.
RST
only designs CPUs. Do they really manufacturethem?
The article only talks about CPUs shipped, but not that ARM ships them.
AFAIK ARM cores are use by many chipmaker from Intel to TI, but arm don't sell CPUs.
***Quis custodiet ipsos custodes***
Maybe it is cause ARM does not really shove itself down people's throats. Their business practices help set them apart. In addition, they embrace open source/standards and it's ideals. An example: ...the OpenMAX(TM) working group to define a royalty-free, cross-platform API (application programming interface) that standardizes access to multimedia processing primitives used extensively in video codecs such as MPEG-4, audio and image codecs, and 2D and 3D graphics. The OpenMAX API will enable library and codec implementers to rapidly and effectively make use of the full potential of new silicon - regardless of the underlying hardware architecture.
Lets see free, cross platform, standardized and hardware independent. That meets all my requirements of a good idea(tm). Also their support for embedded Linux probably does not hurt them either.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
The government also have to show harm to the consumer (at least in the US you do - I don't think they have to in Europe). This is always the hardest part.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
There are plenty of other monopolies or near monopolies out there. Go read up on Sysco if you want one (they control basically all grain silos in the US). The ones people care about are the one that get press time. The ones that stay low on the radar, almost nobody cares about. Most people don't actually do a lot of general research, they just get in to whatever is news. You have to do a bit of digging to come upon lesser known monopolies.
With that amount shipping a year... I really should get around to fiddling with ARM assembly more. Not a bad way to land a job, I bet.
Being a monopolist, or having a monopoly, is not a crime.
However, engaging in behavior that takes unfair advantage of
one's monopolist state to inhibit or stifle competition can be a
crime.
I am not a lawyer, but I know right from wrong...
I propose a simpler explanation: obscurity. The fact that ARM has a large market share doesn't automatically mean that everyone knows about it -- in fact, how many /.ers can honestly say that we know a lot about ARM?
/. are really good at complaining about Microsoft, Intel, AMD, SCO, and just about any company whose name is mentioned. But because ARM keeps a pretty low profile, it avoids the hatred that will inevitably be directed toward it now that its on slashdot.
In short, we at
i'm not saying this, that, or the other thing about arm, but if you look at the debacle of california and their power problems when electricity was deregulated there, then it is clear that for some matters, a monopoly is actually a good thing
it's simplistic to think monopoly=bad automatically
but it's also bad to not recognize where monopolies are a necessary evil due to the high cost and other barriers to competition (do you really want to wire all of california a number of times redundantly for electricity?)
where you recognize a monopoly as inescapable, you must regulate them, bind them with legislation, and watch them like a hawk... and then they are "good"
btw, here's another monopoly that just made the news, and no, they are neither good nor necessary:
us govt and de beers in an agreement to allow them to reenter the us market after a 50 year hiatus for monopolistic practices
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I see this kind of ting far too often on slashdot, a post about some great achievement followed by a snarky comment from an editor about its inefficiency or some other nit, to be followed up by hundreds of posts proclaiming how they would have done it better. I say applaud those innovating and succeeding, don't discourage them.
PS, I have 8 gmail invites to give away (I can't get rid of them fast enough lol), so if you want one please post your obfuscated email addresses below (logged in members only, preference given to subscribers).
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Their website has this picture displaying products based on their architecture.
Of note: Microsoft, Portalplayer (iPod Interface), Philips, Redhat, IBM, LG, NetBSD, Texas Instruments. WOW, there's too many to list them all, but this is pretty crazy.
Looks like a monopoly to me, but does anybody know the names of ARM's competitors?
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20011102S0121
What ZDNet is implying is this: "People don't like Microsoft because it's a monopoly. But they don't dislike ARM, which is also a monopoly. That's inconsistent and illogical."
Firstly, it's highly questionable whether ARM can be called a monopoly in the sense that MSFT is, because ARM has only about 80% of its market, vs over 90% in the case of MSFT. ARM's competitors have more than twice as much market share as MSFT's competitors.
But, much more to the point, ARM has not engaged in illegal practices to bankrupt its competitors. Remember, for example, Microsoft's piracy of Stacker's technology. Remember how they broke Netscape, by reducing the price of their own browser to zero by cross-subsidizing its development. Today, MSFT is trying to strangle Linux by concluding agreements with PC vendors which prohibit sales of dual-boot systems. These agreements, forced on PC vendors by MSFT's enormous market power, are almost certainly illegal, but taking MSFT to court would cost many millions of dollars and the case would last for years. These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
MSFT's attitude is, it's OK to break the law if you can get away with it or if the benefit exceeds the costs. That's why Microsoft is widely (and correctly) perceived as evil, not because it has a large market share.
... for such market dominance. And Motorola, Samsung, Sony and everyone else too. I've vaguely known about ARM for a long time and associated them with RISC chips and some PDAs but didn't know they have gotten so big. This is really big, isn't it? Biggest chip supplier to the hottest and still growing appliance market. The Brits have lost it in many areas where they used to do well but this is pleasant surprise. Congrats to the Brits for a job well done.
Hasn't most software either stayed the same price or is now more expensive, while hardware gets cheaper? (50% rhetoric/ 50% inquiry)
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
Following on from her success with BBC Basic, Sophie Wilson was asked to help with the instruction set, testing it by hand, on paper !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Intel is Arm's strongest compeditor in low-power embedded chips with its Xscale chips. Unfortunately, Intel has applied the Pentium 4's famous Netburst architecture to the poor Xscale, resulting in marvelous clock speeds of over 700mhz, but with much added heat and power consumption. You can probably imagine what this does to battery life. The last thing the world needs is Prescott in a PDA.
ARM on the other hand has been following a high computation per clock cycle approach, like AMD (or Pentium M) which makes sense for their applications because it results in lower heat and power consumption. A 1ghz PDA might sound impressive, but if battery life is half an hour, I won't be buying one.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
... they design 'em, and other people licence the designs. A small point, but one worth making.
``and maybe it is strange: according to the article many would say ARM is a monopolist, but you never hear anyone say 'ARM sucks!'. But then again, why would they?"``
It's not strange at all: consumers and end users know little nor care little about the embedded processor, and frankly, the choice of embedded processor has little if any impact on the end user.
There are many other monopolies in various parts of society that people don't get worked up about.
All packed toghether so you dont have to search
In soviet russia ARM boycots you!
I, for one, welcome our new processor market overlords.
I can't afford a non ARM cell phone, you insensitive clod.
Can't slashdot readers take critisim and self-reflection? He is only stating facts.
It is easier to critise than to construct, and many in this forum are guilty of that.
PS, You can send me one of those gmail thingees if you have any left (mark99 aaattt gmx dot net)
I don't think people dislike monopolies. They dislike what monopolies have come to represent, and what they can lead to. I don't hate the idea of a monopoly. Do you? I just don't like the apparent and usually inevitable consequences.
Monopolies aren't inherently evil, just like dictators. It's just that in almost every example of their existence, they have shown to be detrimental to individuals, businesses, or society as a whole. A "benevolent", utilitarian dictator with the intent to make life better for his/her people could be beneficial to society. He/she would not be limited by legislation, and could focus on working towards a better future without worrying about bureaucracy or red tape. History demonstrates that any good utilitarian tries to amass as much wealth and influence as possible in order to serve these exact purposes. The more power they have, the better job they can do to serve the people. Humans would do much better with a benevolent dictator that they could ever come close to with any semblance of democracy.
Of course, history also demonstrates that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The day the "benevolent" dictator decides that they've done enough for society and that it's time to serve themselves is the day that everything goes downhill. The unfortunate fact is that those who would make good dictators would never be ruthless enough to attain such power. If they were, they probably wouldn't be in the best interest of the public good.
A monopoly is not bad in theory. If a company or organization had a monopoly on... say, microchips, they could drive the technology much faster and better, because they would control every aspect of it. They wouldn't have to worry so much about their software being compatible with their hardware, because they always know exactly what processor is being used. They wouldn't have to fight with competitors over standards, and could add as much functionality as they wanted, setting their own standards.
Unfortunately, theory is not the real world. In practice, monopolies don't do things because they're in the best interest of the public. They do them because they're in the best interest of the company. (Or at least, the company's officers.) This leads to higher profits (theoretically), but lower customer satisfaction. Some side-effects include buggy software, products that fail or break sooner than they should, etc. Because of this, the getting-screwed-public gets fed up and starts hollering. Thus, everyone hates monopolies. But what if the products and services of a monopoly just worked? I'll bet John Q. Public wouldn't care one way or the other at that point.
The average person doesn't care if something goes well. They become livid when there's a problem. A customer won't usually do very much if a company does their job exceedingly well. They will usually boycott the company and stage a rally if the company does poorly. I took an entrepreneurship class in 1992, and learned that the average person would tell 3 people when they were pleased with a product or service, but 11 when they were displeased. Since the internet became the next big thing (around 1994-1995) those numbers have probably skyrocketed. Humans are a loud, complaining bunch.
So is a monopoly bad? Not inherently, but they usually end up that way. I'd say that no one is going after ARM because their products just work and don't seem to cause problems. Their monopoly has not intentionally shut down any competition, or blatantly violated anti-trust laws. Until they screw us, I say more power to 'em.
There's nothing not to like about a $109 piece of hardware capable of running linux like the Gumstix brought to you by a little ARM processor.
ayershome.org/users/eric
Who here on Slashdot is actually developing with ARM-based processors? I have to say, Helium 210-80 is pretty freaking cool. We should be discussing the merits of this technology.
I think people don't say 'ARM sucks' because you can't really customize your cell phone/pda with this or that cpu, how much ram/hdd you want or what gfx card you want.
If you could actually build a DIY phone as most builds their computer THEN we probably would complain about the monopoly.
--- No, english is not my mother tongue.
ARM does good business. They support they cutomers. they make good products. That's all. I don't care if they are a monopoly as long as they continue to be the benevolent dictator.
They ship exactly what the customer wants. In cell-phone markets it's common to "roll your own" processor. You basically order the ARM core and then tell them exactly what instructions you want to be in the chip. They will deliver that.
Bot Assisted Blogging
ARM does not sell to the consumer. They sell to other companies who have a professional purchase department. And if ARM tries to pull the same stunts as MS does, they will see a decline in sales, like, DAMN fast....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Wherever I go in the US the toilet nearly always says 'American Standard' (I think I've seen one other brand somewhere). They seem to have almost complete domination over at least the public restroom market, and I've never heard any complaints about them. So are they a benevolent monopoly or am I just not clued in enough in the sanitary porcelain business?
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
-Hillary Clinton
The full quote is:
"Many of you are well enough off that
Just maybe no one keeps their phones long enough for them to relise any errors with them.
I like muppets.
Aaarghh! In English, there is a perfectly fine word for that: benign.
Maybe they're like that company in Halloween 3, just laying low until they can "activate" all their chips.
John Kerry is a Joke!
(yea, I know, this is /. not Fark)
This is all from memory, however. Here's a more accurate history.
If Sysco destoryed all their grain storage and stocks? This would be their right, as they own it. Do you think that would have no impact on the world? Do not think it would have more impact than software bugs?
Sysco is just the chosen example, there are plenty of others. How about General Electric? They aren't the singular monopoly you are used to, but rather the verticle type, controlling a whole line of products. The make your light bulbs, your appliances, they sell you your insurance, make your medical equipment, your jet engines, you weapon systems, etc. They are a larger company than even Microsoft, the largest in the world last I checked.
Thing is, you really do care about what you hear about. Now if you have a special intrest in something that most peopel don't and thus hear about something that affects it, maybe you care about something most people don't but really, you limit your scope of care to that which you hear about and matters to you.
Don't pretend like there aren't other monopolies out there, and that they can't do things to fuck people over. If you haven't researched it and/or don't care, that's fine, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
Also notice I never mentioned Microsoft. I am simply pointing out a general trend. I like using the Sysco example because most people haven't heard of them, and because most people dismiss them with a wave as you do. They never consider what a widespread interruption to the food supply would mean.
My real point is that companies can be monopolies, so long as they stay off the public radar. My dad works for one such company, but no one knows they are a monopoly so no one cares.
This is just stupid.
And they're serious!
Arm designs chips and then lets other license them and make them. So intel and the others in the list got a simple choice. Do their own work or pay ARM for their work.
So plenty of competition and hardly small ones. It just seems that some of the big boys prefer think giving ARM money makes a better deal for them. After all it is not like IBM or Intel can't design their own chips.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Arm gives us subchips, it netlist or the "code". Depending on the size of the chip, royalties are given to arm. Suppose in the Access point i have a 3 million gate chip, ARM would be about 100000to200000 gates. The competitor is mips. But since mips has higher power consumpltion it is used mostly with DSL modems etc., which get power of the wall. Most mobile devices are ARM based. And since the number of mobile devices is much more than that of devices like DSL modems, VOIP phones Network processors, ARM has more market than mips
ARM may have a dominant position, but they do not have a monopoly.
Economically, ARM is engaged what is called "monopolistic competition". They have a product which is interchangeable with that of competitiors, but is differentiated from the alternative offerings. Same as Nike shoes, BMW cars, Apple computers.
President,
George W Bush
because they embrace fair business tactics, they have good products and they simply do a good job with improving their technology and they dont try to kill off the competition. Arm is a company in good old European style, which seem to die out more and more and being replaced with get rich quick no matter how bad it is for everybody companies.
Core?
In 2001 a student produced an open source microprocessor implementing a cut down version of the ARM instruction set, However not long after, ARM pressured OpenCores to remove the it from their website, and nnARM disappeared.
Maybe the reason people like ARM is that at the moment, most of their competition is from big companies and not open source. If projects like OpenCores catch on and FPGAs become cheaper then maybe open source can perform as well in that region as it does in software. Then I think people would not be happy with ARM taking down compatible products, just as people would not be happy if Microsoft went after WINE.
Steven Murdoch.
web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
To me, ARM instruction set looks simple and elegant and completely in the spirit of John von Neumann's original idea how an universal computing device should be designed.
Comparing to it, x86 architecture evolves for 30 years like a deseased mutant infected with cancer. Backward compatibility on instruction set is a total nonsense from engineering point of you. You do not feed hay or put a saddle on your today's car either.
There you are, staring at me again.
There is only one thing ARM did which borders on evil and it bit me hard.
... and never heard a thing.
About 10 years ago they presented the Piccolo DSP add-on to their ARM processor. Using the AMBA processor bus you can add features to the processor core and Piccolo did so too.
Like the rest of the ARM designs it looked clean, tidy, elegant and actually rather inventive. As it hapened I was on a networking design for a new high speed compact system and we needed just something like Piccolo, so I immediately jumped on the opportunity, contacted them for samples and more docs
Having advocated intenally for ARM and put some of my rep on the line, this did cost me a bit and I am still disappointed in their rotten customer service.
While out of the business I still tracked development there and it appears that only small numbers of people used Piccolo. ARM itself now seems to disown it, you get no docs on ARM's own website on it.
I have been unable to determine what happened to the Piccolo and would appreciate any explanations from this community.
As many have pointed out, ARM haven't shipped any chips at all. They only do the design and other such as Intel manufacturer them. For example the Philips LPC2000 is only $6 and is effectively an entire ARM-based computer on a chip including Flash memory, 10-bit ADC convertor, etc.
The ARM instruction set is really nice to use. It's so simple that programming it is easy. After being exposed to this I couldn't go near x86. Of course it helped that Acorn computers had built-in assemblers, and you could knock up quick programs in which the listing could be half BASIC and half assember.
Phillip.
If you've ever had to program one in assembly, you'll know what I mean. The carry flag is inverted! Seriously, what kind of idiot would design such an architecture?
does NOT corrupt absolutely; absolute power attracts the corrupt. No matter how "benevolent" a dictator, it is immoral to coerce men to act against their will. Only someone corrupt would WANT absolute power; viz. every president since, oh, 1792.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If Apple ports Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger to run on this new ARM Tiger processor, then I'd be able to write programs with Java 1.5.0 Tiger for it.
The world would truly be a better place.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
Somewhere around 90% of MS's operating system sales are to other companies, called OEMs, or Original Equipment Manufacturers. Companies like HP and IBM and Dell and Gateway and a horde of smaller vendors. It's MS's actual customers, the OEMs, who were complaining about their strong-arm tactics and abusive pricing schemes and whatnot. (Although many of the OEMs complained quietly, for fear of offending the great and mighty MS who could crush them like a bug and triple the overall costs of their systems on a whim.) The whole reason the USDOJ got involved with the question of browsers is that OEMs wanted to offer their customers a choice between Netscape and IE (this was, if you'll recall, back when Netscape dominated the market), and MS said, "try it and we'll remove your generative organs with a rusty spoon."
Anyway, the real point is not that MS has a "more real" monopoly or something. The big issue is that MS abuses their monopoly. Gratuitously and incessantly. When you have a monopoly, free market rules no longer apply (by definition), so the market has to trust in your good behavior. Which is why abuse of monopoly is called "anti-trust".
then you could fit right in at unprecedented evile.con, aka trustworthycomputing.com.
a ck ing-Arrest.html
the search is over?
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-H
Firstly, they operate in a market where their customers could easily up and move to one of their competitors. Their bus architecture is standardised, so all it would take would be to floorplan a new CPU and port their software to the new platform. The embedded market does not have the tremendous momentum that the PC-compatible industry has.
Secondly, they are based in a country (the UK/EU) that actually UPHOLD it's competition laws; and thus they couldn't get away with what Micrsoft has in the US.
The reason why ARM, isn't hated it the fact that chip makers (IBM, Intell, Motarolla...) Need to release some specs for their chips in order for developers to make hardware that uses them.
so if * 1010 1010 1010 1010 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0001 = ADD 1 1
Then a competing chip maker can make a chip that uses that takes the same Op Code to do the same thing although they may do it differently but as far as the software is concerned there is no difference. (that is why AMDs, and Intell are compatible to most software because they stole each others op code
Now with windows. Microsoft doesn't tell you that the binary sequence * 1001 1110 1010 1001 0110 1110 1001 1110 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
that this will put a command button on top left side of your window.
So if someone want to make a windows compatible product they need reverse engineer every thing (which is much harder with 32 bit then 16 bit) and by the time they are done Microsoft will make a new version that changes everything.
That is the real difference there are or can be 99% ARM compatible chips out there.
But their isn't any 99% windows compatible OS's out there. Sure there are some projects that are getting there but they are not there yet.
* These binary numbers I just picked at random. Not actual code
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Have a look at DOJ vs. United Dominion Enterprises . Now there's a company born to monopolise.
Perhaps if ARM renamed to "We determine your mobile phone cost" there'd be a little more interest.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
One possible reason may be because ARM is actually a recent entity to marketshare.
If you remember ARM got its start by producing a mobile chip that was similar to the PowerPC and fast enough for Apple's Newton line.
It was very ironic that Palm decided to use Apple's desktop chip (the 68030) - which devloped into the Dragonball processor. And to me, this is one reason that only recent Palm offerings even come close to the Newton.
ARM holdings MAY not have been in any hot seat because of Apple.
While I don't think Apple owns any more shares in the company, at one point, they owned a majority stake. Sales of ARM stock ended up being a saviour to Apple's bottom line. This is one of the MAIN reasons Apple discontinued the Newton (or Jobs chose to axe the Newton) Myths place it on revenge against Sculley and on product consolidation. When, in fact, Jobs saw it as opportunity to fudge a bottom line and to gain research and development dollar for the iMac line.
THIS - is one reason I think ARM isn't considered a monpolist - after all - Apple owns 100% of the Apple market and they aren't considered a monoplist - ARM is still benefiting from this relationship.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Another reason ARM dont have too many people complaining about them is their designs go into some really inexpensive system on chip (SOC) devices.
So anyone wanting to play with the technology can have a development system really cheap like these (check out the tiny OKI modules) or even open source hardware like this
Well, if others had set up (as I did) an address purely for testing this hypothesis, they would have been in the same infinite return-per-unit-risk bucket I was. Mailexpire, which I use, is very handy for all this sort of thing (obtaining the GBP10 coupon if you subscribe to a newsletter, etc, etc).
If you ran Windows, you would be constantly furious. Because Windows is spurious and crashious. The designers must have been delirious. I thought I would tell you this, just in case you are curious.
First, 99 percent of the population has never heard of ARM.
Second, this industry naturally tends toward monopolies or small, cooperative, oligopolies.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Er, no. Trusts were evil business cartels. The term antitrust derives from the US law which was originally formulated to combat business trusts - now commonly known as cartels.
If projects like OpenCores catch on and FPGAs become cheaper then maybe open source can perform as well in that region as it does in software. Then I think people would not be happy with ARM taking down compatible products, just as people would not be happy if Microsoft went after WINE.
The big problem that opencores.org and other open hardware projects will run into, if they aren't already, is patents. For hardware, there is distressingly often only a handful of good ways of doing something, which will have been patented long ago. I'd love to design a 2D/3D graphics chip core (and I have the expertise to pull it off - IAACompEng with graphics experience), but if I tried I'd have everyone from Matrox on down knocking on my door with a big stick in hand.
Perhaps if the patent revolution finally comes for software, hardware patent lifetimes will be shortened as a side effect.
ARM SUCKS!
very interesting!
Actually, ARM shipped -0- processors last year. ARM licenses; ARM does not manufacter.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
they don't ship terrible products responsible for billions in losses every year and the consumer doesn't deal with them directly
-Tim Louden
- LDMFD R13!,{R0-R12,R14} - load multiple with full descending stack, stack pointer in R13, into registers R0-R12 and R14.
- ADDCS R0,R1,R2 LSL #4 - if carry flag clear, left logical shift R2 by 4 places, then add to R1 and put result in R0.
And these particular condition codes etc are not specific new CISCy instructions, but can be incorporated in *any* appropriate instruction - the barrel shifter doing the LSL for example being just another stage in the magical pipeline.This kind of elegance you just don't see in other instruction sets.
I don't know why they are compare this to M$... ARM processor is a hardware company. And we don't see any major problems on their hardware so far.
Unlikes windows, It doesn't have designing flaws and bugs, and tons of update patch. Windows is suck, because it shouldn't have a big marketing with it's big problems. I really hate those super long alert box. and fu(ked up message. They are pretty retarded. Compare to Linux or Mac OS X.
Off the top of my head....
Sub pixel anti aliasing so 8pt font were crisp and clear on a 15 inch monitor
A file copy / move process that allowed you to pause, and more importantly when copying or moving 10,000 files, one which didn't just crash dead when file # 5,734 refused to copy.
incidentally copy / move was truly multitasking even back then, you could perform a dozen simultaneous operations if you wished to.
OS in EPROM, so the computer was up and running before the CRT had warmed up... (incidentally, the upgrade from RISCOS 3.0 to 3.5 was free when I wrote to them asking about some bugs in 3.0, they just sent me a jiffy bag with the 8 chips containing 3.5, totally gratis...)
all application software TOTALLY resided in it's own folder, no registry shit, which is probably why acorn died a death, nobody was willing to develop software that could only be protected by dongle.
system didn't slow to a slug pace when formatting a floppy, alos did 2.8 Mb floppies way back then, in addition to 1.44 Mb formats read / write ability
some killer applications, like artworks, which later was bought by corel and bastardised to become xara, and a full fledged semi professional DTP app that came on 13 floppies, 4 or 5 of which were dictionaries and fonts... plus some really clever shit like iterated systems fractal image compression way back in 92 or 93...
I could go on and on.....
Things Windows95a had at the same time.
Hugely slower systems, win95 on the early pentium 60 and 75 mhz cpu was orders of magnitude slower than an Acorn.
Swap file, this was the one serious advantage, on an acorn when you ran out of memory your app crashed.
16 bit (or greater) colour, the basic acorn a5000 was limited to 256 unique colours on screen, pron on an acorn looked like acid freak mosaics, but ok for dtp / games and everything else
the win95 boxes also lacked a reset key on the keyboard, a particularly dumb idea from acorn
far larger hard disks, 600 mb on a p75 as opposed to the 40 mb connors in an acorn, nearly enough to hold an entire CD!!!! mind you, wintel boxes needed the extra space because bloatware had already arrived
Later when I got into hosting and looked inside my first RAQ2 to see just what I had spend all that money on I was reminded of my earlier acorns... one main PCB, apparently pretty sparseley populated, and apparently running so little electrical power temperatures on the board were more closely tied to whether you had the window open than cpu loading.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
Here you have Adobe: the giant of the graphics/printing world which (and I don't have figures) owns the lion's share of the graphics and (on demand) printing market, as well the electronic document format PDF.
Are they a monopolist? Sure are. Monopolies (IIRC) are not Illegal per se in as much as if you violate anti-trust laws. Thats the diff between MS and Adobe.
Being from the Graphics (Printing and Prepress side), Adobe has a more open standard in its PostScript language. They maintain the de facto standards as well as the de facto interpreter. However there are a number of PostScript interpreters out there that perform as well if not better than Adobe's interpreter.
Harlequin is (or was) a major contender in that they had a widely used PS interpreter.
As we in the Open Source community know, there is Ghostscript and a number of PDF viewers. Many Linux distros come with ps2pdf -- a very usable PostScript to PDF converter. If you have Ghostscript and ps2pdf installed, you ca print to PDF just as you would Acrobat Distiller.
As this in a nutshell, Adobe does not stifel innovation even if it does hone in on their market. Rather, it performs a service (IMHO) to Adobe by promoting PostScript as a page description language.
Kind like what Open Source has been promoting for these many years and the proof was right there all along.
Open source works.
INSERT INTO comment VALUE('Doh!') WHERE user='you';
I'm currently studying for a masters degree in Electronics and Software Engineering, this course is sponsored by ARM. I have been to the ARM main office and they are a very cool company and they treat their employees very well.
.
... oh, forget it.
Your head a splode
Not to be crass, but ARM is like the plantation masters who were kind to "their negros". Just wait till a slave tries to escape and you'll see just how nice they really are.
Sure, ARM is easier going than alot of other outfits, and we don't notice them as much because they deal mostly with companies instead of individuals so their effects on peoples liberty aren't directly noticed as much. But's lets make no mistake about it, there is no nice way to enforce patents any more than there is a nice way to rape people, sooner or later something is going to half to give.
Further down thread you will find complaints about how ARM shut down an open source core project at www.opencores.com. As this kind of movement gets more and more popular - don't be supprised when their nasty side starts to reveal itself.
Look around you; are the most deserving people people always the ones getting promoted?
Think about the IT industry. Are the best products the ones that usually win?
We want to believe that merit is rewarded; and to some degree it is. But the only way we can believe this absolutely is either to close our eyes or to buy into a tautological definition of merit: merit is that that succeeds. There's no particular mystery as to why ARM is not resented: it is dominant and it has technically superior products. It confirms our cherished belief that if you build a technically superior product, you will win (ignoring the history of desktop ARM of course), and so we feel well disposed towards them. What really motivates contempt among the technologically sophisticate is not success, or copyrights, or patents, but when mediocrity wins and undermines our belief in the fairness of "the system".
A note about the tautological definition of merit. I was an MIS director in the late 80s early 90s. At the time we were on an exponential growth curve for personal computer adoption in business. Apple had a product that was superior to DOS (and later Windows) in so many ways it was laughable to compare the two. However, it cost more than twice as much to equip people with a Mac as with a PeeCee; in an era when a typical computer order was by the truckload, this was huge. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, was Microsoft more meritorious than Apple? Well from the point of view of their shareholders there is no question this is true. The situation from their customers' standpoint is murkier.
Yes, the availability of a cheaper, lower cost personal computer probably sped the adoption of computers. We probably reached the 90% point of equipping office workers a couple of years earlier. Yet even back in the 80s there were studies even then that the cost of training and supporting users dwarfed the costs of buying the box, but most people could not quite bring themselves to believe this could possbly be true. Like in many things, the human capacity for inconsistency was amazing: it was not common for CEOs and top brass to have Macs and the troops to be equipped with PCs. Clearly they understood the value of quality to their own productivity. But, a loading dock full of computer crates was a tangible sign that you were making progress in "computerizing" your business.
Of course now people know the costs of training and support in spades, which is why you hear people bandying terms like "TCO" about when they thought this was mere flummery fifteen years ago. It's just the cost of other things like network security that they're blind about. I can confidently predict the world will settle on a cheap, half-assed solution to this problem and deal with the negative consequences for years to come.
The point is long winded story is not to say that Microsoft is evil for having succeeded with a product that was not very good. It's to point out that the tautological theory of merit ignores the way that real peole focus on the very short term. Often the company that wins is the one that keeps their customers focused on the short term. ARM in fact, got a lucky break; they are in a sense a failure in the desktop processor market, but succeeded by finding a niche in the embedded processor market. If for some reason their design drew several times the power, they could well be another entry on the roll of talented failures.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
First, ARM doesn't make all those chips, they design CPU cores. Chips are designed around those cores. As an example, pretty much all CDMA phones (Sprint and Verizon in the US, most of Japan and Korea, some of China) contain Qualcomm chips.
Second, ARM sucks because their compilers suck. Their compilers suck because the old ones generate buggy code and the new ones aren't backward-compatible with the old ones, so that their customers are stuck with old versions that aren't maintained any more. Worse, their compilers suck enough that some chip vendors decided to write their own compilers, which suck at least as much. Getting code that compiles and runs correctly on all ARM compilers is a challenge. And we're talking about C90 code here, not even C++ of C99. Even the newest compilers are very poor at optimizing code.
Third, ARM isn't the only company designing ARM CPUs. Digital did one, and now Intel does. Those chip families (StrongARM and XScale) were/are faster than anything that ARM designed themselves.
If you want a non-ARM cell-phone (as someone asked), look for a Siemens phone. Except for the latest S65, they pretty much all use a non-ARM CPU. The S55 is actually a good phone.
Embedded Systems usually do not have many issues with backwards compatibility. Switching to another core is not a big deal. Of course this doesn't apply with things like Palm Pilots where users load their own software
I used to work on a high-volume embedded product. The first generation used a popular Motorola chip, the 2nd used one based on ARM. Most of our C-code remained unchanged when we switched cores. Just some hardware-abstraction layer stuff, and that was less than 5% of the code.
1) ARM doesn't make processors, they license cores. These get made by Atmel, Intel, etc.
2) Double standard because they don't suck.
glad we got that solved ;)
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
to BE a monopoly. What's illegal is to abuse your monopoly status. If Arm doesn't abuse its position, then nobody will complain. Sometimes being a monopoly is a good thing - the higher your production, the higher your protential efficiency. If you are passing this savings to the consumer, everyone wins.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Especially when "Windows" is written at the top of your typical Windows 9x BSOD.
Actually they do - or at least they used to - they contract manufactured ALL of the chips in the Newton.
I believe Texas Instruments and Sharp made them for Apple but the CPUs in Newtons are stamped with ARM on them whereas XScale and StrongARM also have Intel, etc on them.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I saw a couple of posts that suggested that the ARM cores have only reached 400mhz. Actually some Pocket PCs are already comeing out with 500+ mhz, and more interestingly, Samsung has a 1ghz processor. I have read a press report that the 1ghz processor is shipping, but I havn't seen one in any consumer device yet, so I assume its more of an industrial type part.
Business News and Resources: www.usasource.net
FTA: Google is facing a growing number of critics and skeptics for its somewhat elitist image.
What does this have to do with ARM processors? Because Google has captured the internet community's attention by providing a clean looking, excellent search engine with low overhead for the client?
There were (and are) many search engines before Google. Google just did it better. Now they're elitist? This single line about Google at the end of the article comes off as a cheap shot.
There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong.
Could it then, in turn, be the case that ARM is obscure because they are not attracting so much bad attention? Which then may be attributed to better business practices than MSFT or certainly SCO?
People do not run into annoyingly crappy ARM products each and every day. Maybe because ARMs involvement is cleverly disguised - however, I think rather that it is because crappy ARM products are less frequent than annoying Microsoft products.
Point of interest though: ARM is dealing with more a mature technology than intel or AMD - ARM processors don't heat up or do faulty division. Still: why doesn't intel och AMD own a bigger share of this "easy" market?
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
nobody has anything against 'em because they just sell you stuff and it's up to you to do something with it.
I worked on a BREW project recently (cell phone app) and we had to use the ARM compiler because the version of gcc we had produced bloated code.
The compiler choked (as in, refused to compile or even crashed) on all sorts of legitimate constructs. Oh yeah and the compiler is several thousand dollars per seat, with a license tied to the computer's MAC address.
Wouldn't there be more of an incentive to improve the compiler and/or make it cheaper if they had some competition? Non-evil monopolist? I don't think so.
Well, we are lucky to have a monopolist here who at least knows something about their job. The competitors could not win with them, because: * the small instruction size, along with the Thumb extension - compare MIPS16 much later; Hitachi SuperH is always 16-bit, though; smaller opcodes mean small memory and allow using a narrow or slower bus, thus reducing system power consumption * low power consumption of the core itself * even high-powered ARM9s are fully licensable (compare to higher MIPS devices, which were produced only for SGI) * extendability - there are many versions of ARM cores, they share a simple bus; this means that there is a wealth of peripherals for each core I think that SuperH could be a good choice, too. But they are late-comers. I, for one, use SuperH in my embedded designs. For reasons unknown, the embedded market *loves* ARM cores without an MMU (phew!). It's silly of course (especially in the industrial market), but they are cheaper and more power-efficient. Now, it's hard to get MMUless SuperH implementations, but you can always order a MMU-capable ARM. Note that ARM-including products are not promoted by ARM itself. You get a mail folder for TMS320C5471 (a DSP from Texas Instruments). What's inside? Of course, a ARM7TDMI. The same about Analog Devices (ahh, the eternal competitors) ADuC7000 series. Not to mention Motorola i.MXL that powers my Clie PalmOS-based device (ARM9 inside - yes, even Motorola did it!). So, ARM becomes an industry standard without anyone actually noticing until they make a close review of the products.
We use SPARC, he said disARMingly.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
ARM has kept defended monopoly from legitimate competition. For example, ShengYu Shen's nnARM "clone" of their ARM7 CPU was available at OpenCores.com until ARM had it pulled, "temporarily". The nnARM was API-compatible, but inside it contained no ARM-patented logic. The project page says:
The team members of nnARM are currently discussing with a company to sort out some issues. This webpage is not available until further notice.
The page also says:
Updated: 15-Oct-2001 08:27:20
CVS: no files in cvs
--
make install -not war
It isn't common to roll your own ARM instructions. You can add other functionality easily though. It is possible to add instructions, but far from common.
Also note ARM doesn't sell CPUs. Not a one. They license IP to other companies who build chips. Cirrus for example is a big vendor of the more generic style of ARM chips.
ARM is almost alike with Microsoft (Market shares) and in a way, they are completely different. Being the fact that they do not try to put their competition into the ground. They're just another company trying to make their way in the business world.
Game Maker Community
If it wasn't so dominant, Palm would just get 200Mhz processors with 68K instruction sets, we would continue to use very mature CodeWarrior development tools and all existing applications would run blazing fast.
Instead, we now have software 68K emulation on top of ARM, on a PDA(!). How good can it be for performance and battery life? And mixing ARM and 68K code in the same application is a real pain because of different byte order, among other things.
ARM Suckz!
On what grounds, exactly, did ARM have opencores shut down?
This would seem to be a case of a large company shutting down a hobbyist group based on the knowlege that the group would lack the ability to afford so much as hiring a lawyer to respond to a legal threat letter.
However: You state that they're using the ARM instruction set. They had "ARM" in the name. It does not seem at all unlikely to me that they had in some way infringed on ARM's intellectual property with what they are doing and ARM went to them not out of "oh let's shut down this project" but simply out of a legitimate intellectual property complaint.
I think you are absolutely correct about obscurity. Our dislike of companies grow when we feel forced to make decisions based on the offerings of a company. I often feel forced into a corner by Microsoft...and to a lesser extent Intel. ARM itself does not come up in the decision process of consumers...so it does not garner the loathing that we reserve for Microsoft.
Becuase ARM dosen't abuse and take advantage of the fact they have such control and such a market share, they could ea
Alan Greenspan wrote about monopolies in a great essay simply called "Anti-trust". He makes the case that there are two types of monopolies. One type is like Microsoft. The other type maybe is like ARM, though I am not too familiar with ARM's situation. The example Mr. Greenspan used was ALCOA, an aluminum manufacturer at the time the essay was written. The company, he said, was a monopoly because it was so efficient at making its product that no one was at all capable of producing aluminum so cheaply. How this differs from a Microsoft monopoly is that if ALCOA used its monopoly status to inflate prices then it would cease to be a monopoly, since low prices are exactly what made it a monopoly. Thus it was not a coersive monopoly. He went on to point out how this has a net benefit for everyone (as anyone who understands the economics of efficiency knows) and denounced how the government was trying to punish ALCOA for being a monopoly. (IE-It was being punsihed for coming up with superior manufacturing techniques.) Perhaps a modern day ALCOA is Wal-Mart, which, putting aside you opinions on labour, largely sells thing cheaply because of their new innovations in supply chain logistics. I believe they came up with many new tricks in transporting inventory that make their inventory costs very low. So if Wal-Mart becomes (or is) a monopoly, it is because they have low prices. But if they try to strong-arm prices then they get screwed. This is why Wal-Mart is not harmful for consumers in the way Microsoft is.
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
Oh, is that supposed to mean that they're running a "dictatorship of the proletariat" based on complete "public" ownership of all capital and central management of all sectors of the economy? Works just peachy in Cuba and North Korea.
Actually, an MS apologist I met did use this as an argument in a political debate I was in...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Nah. Cisco has a large marketshare. And there sure isn't as much negative feeling about it. Sure their products aren't really that great and all that, but they don't resort to as many underhanded tactics as MS.
There are other large dominant companies who don't create as much bad feeling especially amongst people who really KNOW the companies.
Even Intel doesn't play as dirty as Microsoft - which is why Intel doesn't get as much attention from the antitrust people. In fact Intel has guidelines for its employees so that they are less likely to fall foul of the antitrust ppl.
e.g.
"Don't, without ILT pre-approval:
1. Refuse to deal with or re-license an existing customer (particularly in Europe);
2. Limit to whom, where or from what locations customers can resell products bought from Intel;
3. Require any customer or supplier not to deal with another maker of similar products, or require any customer to buy all or nearly all such products from Intel;
4. Require customers to purchase the full line of any type of products offered by Intel. "
I suppose ILT = Intel Legal Team?
Even if Intel isn't loved by so many, it isn't really hated by people. Sure they're tough and maybe ruthless, but hey that's business. That's like getting a hard but legal tackle on the field. Sure you don't like it, but it's legal.
But MS's astroturfing, IP theft when they think they can get away with it, they're like one of those sports people who play dirty _everytime_ they think the referee isn't looking, or if they think it's worth risking going to the sin bin for, or being yellow carded or whatever.
Thing is, is it really necessary for them to do all that? MS Office is actually quite decent compared to the other competitors. They have lots of smart people in their organization, just do the technical and marketing stuff well, and skip the dirty tricks.
Don't ask me to list down all the dirty stuff MS did. There are so many - intentionally breaking MSN for opera, gathering info on other software for Windows 95's registration wizard, DR DOS, Stac Technologies. Many more - just do a search on microsoft and dirty tricks or something like that. If you really knew what Microsoft did, it'll seem like they really operate differently from most other companies. Almost as if dirty tricks are the rule and not the exception for them.
I doubt Coca Cola is hated that much, if at all.
it made my day. thanks.
Considering that Pete Wilson did it, that Wilson, the FERC, and the businesses involved all called it "deregulation", and that it involved cancelling the State's power to regulate the industry, well, you're a partisan dumbass. What Gray Davis did do was to approve a record number of orders for new power plants and launch lawsuits against the companies defrauding the state while standing up to condemnation from the Republicans who called for him to let the "free market" work its magic. He eventually lost his job over it, and even after Enron et al admitted violating the few laws remaining in place, there are still ignorant assholes like you who try to blame it all on Davis. Too bad you weren't paying attention.
Oddly one of the reasons ARM (then under a different name) designed such a small core is that they had no choice. They could not afford more advanced design software, so were limited in the number of components. By this they were forced into making an efficent design, working closely with apple for the doomed Newton.
Well, who would have known that such a great oak would grow from such as small acorn
Maybe it was due to all those electrons and atoms with a little help from archimedes.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
A "monopoly" is someone who has a huge share of the market by virtue of the fact that nobody else has 1) entered the market yet, and/or 2) produced an equivalent product yet. Said "monopoly" is in quotes because it usually doesn't last long due to market pressures. By definition, a monopoly makes monopoly profit - thus attracting competition.
A real monopoly is one that uses coercion (ie., state laws or actual violence or fraud) to control its market. For example, uhm, uhm, let's see, who can I use? Microsoft?
Well, actually, Microsoft is not really a great example, either. Yes, it does use restrictive contracts, but the idiots who sign those contracts are just as guilty as Microsoft of making Microsoft a monopoly. There may be other US Federal law which makes Microsoft actions a monopoly but from an economic viewpoint, Microsoft is mostly guilty of being an asshole company - not actually using state laws or force to get people to buy its products. I tend to refer to Microsoft as a "quasi-monopoly".
And it's getting more "quasi" the more Linux eats into MS's market share.
Nonetheless, until ARM is accused of stealing proprietary information, or forcing other companies by contract to buy its products and not buy from competitors, I find it hard to refer to it as a monopoly for real.
If anyone has information that it does do those things, fine. I have no info one way or the other.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
i thought ARM was Acorn Research i.e. Intel.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Here's how we described the relationship in the PricewaterhouseCoopers publication Technology Forecast: 2002-2004 :
Monopolies are never evil. They are best for the consumer. Who cares if the little guys get trampled, its all about the best pricing for me.
I would just like to clarify the facts about ARM as my uncle is very high up in the company and I have done work experience for them. Mainly, ARM does not make anything, only desgins the cores, then sells them to the highest bidder. For example, most nokia phones have chips made by texas instruments, which in turn bought the design from ARM. As a standard, for each phone sold ARM gets about 10p, so that adds up pretty fast!.
Hope that clears things up.
I think its the quality of the core to begin with. For embedded designs, IBM pushes PowerPC, along with Motorolla, which also pushes dragonball and 68H11 etc... Intel had been pushing the 8051 along with dozens of other companies.
But the ARM architecture is RISC, the core is small, tiny even (check Samsung and National's smallest 32-bit MCUs), flexible, and pervasive enough to have many tools ready for it everywhere. 8051 and the 8086 are also pervasive, and so is the 680x0, but theyre older cores and cant be made as small and powerful as ARM.
So no matter how good the business on any side is, development teams made to sit down and decide on a core would prefer the ARM. There ARE other embedded companies willing to bend over backwards, and provide good customer and engineering services, they cant make good MCUs, or establish their instruction set in the market the way these guys have. Yes its a monopoly just like Intel, but we hate Intel because we pay quite a bit for their CPUs, we just dont KNOW how much we're paying ARM when purchasing the latest Plasma screen (not much, which also loses another reason to hate them).
Just remember the 6502 was popular at one time, and the current ARM designs will lose favor as another design fits the industry's bill. ARM is just trying to be at the innovation edge to be the owner of that new core.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
What makes them different, and not monopolistic, is that they do not use the uptake of their cores to force other sales. They don't force anyone to use their software - you can equally use gdb or ARM or whomever's compilers. They make their debugger specifications public so that anyone can develop ARM tools.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I think the main reason why we don't complain about ARM is the fact that we do not buy their products. Hell, we don't even buy products containing their products. They design the chips, but as the article mentions, they don't make them. Intel manufactures ARM processors for use in PDAs, and a lot of people hate intel. We have no reason to hate ARM, they're so far cut off from us consumer-wise it would be ridiculous to do so. We can hate the company that made the camera, we can hate the company that manufactured the chip that's inside the PDA, but why would we hate the company that just designed the chip and sold it off to another company to manufacture it?
They don't kill nearly half as many people as the other guy. Aren't they wonderfull.
TI, Microchip, Motorola, Atmel, STMicroelectronics, 8051 compatible chips from numerous companies and there is still alot more. just flip through the pages of EE times or Embedded Systems Programming mag.
ARM sucks!
They could prohibit any stores from carrying your milk. If any stores disobey, they can stop selling to them. No store will want to lose the main milk provider, with a proven track record and probably a broad product line, in exchange for some start-up.
This is how monopolies usually work. They leverage their market power to exclude competitors.
Because ARM is great. It's CORE that sucks.
Not a sentence!
What CPU is attached to the Dreamcast console's DSP?
I thought they produced the arm and owned it.
Or perhaps I misread it as Intel manufactors it.
Arm is very power efficient and has had Linux support since the 2.0 days. Anyony remember the Netwinder device of 1999 that ran Redhat 5.2 with Corel WordPefect suite?
It was fast and dirt cheap for those who could not afford a whole pc.
http://saveie6.com/
If they didn't you would have heard of them long ago, with people cursing them,.
I remember when the first ARM cheips came out. Back then the companies acronym meant Acorn Risc Microprocessors. Yes, the same Acorn that made the Atom, Electron, BBC and Master range of computers. The ARM first made it's appearance in the Archimedes range of desktop computers and spanked the equivalent Intel CPUs (Hmmm, doesn't that sound familiar).
When Apple were hunting round for a CPU for the Newton they came across the ARM chipset and "were so impressed they bought a piece of the company". So the company became Advanced Risc Microprosessors instead.
Their CPUs started urning up in all sorts of places, including car gearboxes (Porsche's Tiptronic gearbox) as well as numerous other devices.
The difference between them and other "monopolistic" companies is that they work with their customers instead of ignoring their customers and acting like a bunch of assholes. That is the way you win customers and grow in strength.
In fact, I am willing to be that the only line of CPUs that has come out of the bowels on Intel without a continuous stream of faults if the StrongARM based chips.
for some reason that I would expect has to do with how the instruction is implemented, one of the source operands (I forget whether it's the first or second) can't be the destination. Sure, you can swap the operands, unless you want to square a number (and don't need to keep the original around), but it's a pain.
Granted on x *= x, but in other cases, can't swapping mul operands be handled within the assembler rather than in the compiler, limiting the scope of the non-orthogonality?
Some sizes of load/store have 12-bit displacements; the ones added later, I think, (16-bit and one of the signednesses of 8-bit) only allow 5-bit displacements. A 5-bit displacement field is pretty darned small.
Granted, but what about those architectures that don't allow any nonzero displacement? Be glad you even have a displacement in order to allow quick access to structs. So in your code generator's documentation, give the following advice to programmers: when optimizing private structs for ARM, put "small" elements first to speed access.
Agreed, Thumb is designed to allow smaller code size, but the cost is major non-orthogonality.
Still, even in ARM mode, the code density still beats x86, if only for larger registers and thus fewer mov instructions to get variables on and off the stack. The 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers with which Thumb is designed to compete have even worse non-orthogonality.