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The Ever So Unlikely Tale of How ARM Came To Rule the World
pacopico writes "About 24 years ago, a tiny chip company came to life in a Cambridge, England barn. It was called ARM, and it looked quite unlike any other chip company that had come before it. Businessweek has just published something of an oral history on the weird things that took place to let ARM end up dominating the mobile revolution and rivaling Coke and McDonald's as the most prolific consumer product company on the planet. The story also looks at what ARM's new CEO needs to do not to mess things up."
And Intel have the advantage there.
The acorn risk processor was designed for the British "BBC Microcomputer" to be attached via the "Tube" second processor system as a software development system for schools and colleges. This experimental machine was so successful and fast that it became became the new Acorn Archimedes computer which was used by the British Schools to teach kids how to write computer programmes.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Strange - I can recall discussions of the ARM chip at university back in the early 80's. Either that makes be ten years younger than I though :-) - or someone has their dates wrong.
As I recall (and correct me if I'm wrong) there was a company called Acorn Computer's which produced the BBC Micro - a 6502 based machine.
The 6502 was long in the tooth even in those days (dating back at least to the Commodore Pet ca. 1976).
RISC was flavour of the month in those days, so they set out to create their own RISC based architecture for the next generation of BBC Micro (the Archimedes).
No doubt they had a little help from the local technical college (aka the Cambridge University computing department)
I've always thought ARM was a cool design. Simple, minimalist, sort of a latter-day PDP-11, one of those canonical architectures that just works. Simple chip, not many transistors, low power, good chip for mobile devices. It seems so obvious in retrospect. Especially since that's not what the designers had in mind. They were designing a simple chip because they only had a couple of people and that was all they could afford.
In one of the later scenes in Micro Men there is a whiteboard in the background with the original ARM requirements, right down to the barrel shifter.
...laura
A couple of years ago I donated my Acorn System 1 to the Museum of Computing in Swindon. It was on their Most Wanted list! I learned rather a lot with that machine, hand assembling machine code.
The lesson is to be a light-handed source of standards and building-block supplier instead an All-Encompassing Conglomerate who tries to rule standards from head to foot.
Heed the warning, Google, Oracle, and Apple. (Too late for MS.)
Table-ized A.I.
As a note, back in the day Apple stayed afloat by selling its stake in ARM.
None of the dates are wrong. You're right that ARM was around in the 80s, but they weren't designing chips at the time.
Nonsense. ARM started designing chips in 1983
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
As someone who had a BBC Micro as his first computer (lovely machine for tinkering), it's nice to see the descendants of Acorn survive the juggernaut of the PC and x86. And long may it continue, the last thing we need is a vertically integrated colossus like Intel dominating everything, no matter how good their PC processors are.
ARM architectures were already in use before ARM the company came into being and went into making mobile processors. They were the CPUs for the Acorn Archimedes and Risc PC.
Ah, I still remember that heady day at Acorn World in 1996 (I think it was), riding the train back clutching my precious StrongARM (not made by ARM themselves, apparently) upgrade. The unimaginable pow-ah!
Later upgrades put RAM on the CPU's daughterboard because the bus become the bottleneck.
Somewhat sadly neglected, my Risc PC now gathers dust in a damp garage, but it made me the aspiring-to-efficiency programmer I am today.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
... once they became "powerful enough" and portability mattered. Same way that Intel won on the desktop, really -- compared to mainframes, they were small enough to fit into a useful spot (literally and figuratively) and became powerful enough to be REALLY useful, not just occasionally handy.
But chips themselves don't sell devices -- Intel desktops sold more and more as the OSs and apps got better and better, and it's the same thing with the iPhone and similar devices. Would a 160x160 monochrome Palm Pilot (if it still existed today) sell in iPhone-esque numbers if it had a multicore, gigahertz-plus CPU? The chip makes the product possible, and better products make people want more chips.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The article skipped over the whole development of the arm processor. It wasn't developed for the newton, the original architecture was for the acorn archimedes risc based computers, launched in 1987.
The key difference that set Acorn apart from every desktop PC type computer manufacturer at the time, is they went down the road of actually designing their own processors for the PC market. This is instead of using one from Motorola or IBM
I think what set the ARM apart going forward was they used modern for the time CPU design principles, but they aimed for a lower end consumer grade market instead of the higher end mainframe/server/workstation/supercomputer market. Because of this they were all about getting the most performance from cheaper slightly older chip fab technologies. All of these ultimately meant that the design constraints imposed early on translated well to mobile applications.
Tony Smith's articles on the history of micro-computers does this far better:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/01/acorn_archimedes_is_25_years_old/
There's one simple reason ARM has a strangle-hold on smart phones and tablets... For years, when such devices were being developed, MIPS Technologies was in a shambles. They were reeling from losing SGI, going IPO, and going through the processes of getting acquired by a string of several different companies. They've basically be AWOL this whole time, handing the upstart new market to ARM on a plate.
MIPS is still competitive. They've got extremely low power processors, multi-core 1GHz+ processors, and they've always been more efficient (higher DMIPS/MHz) than ARM. Despite their virtual absence, they're still used extensively in embedded systems... Your printer, WiFi AP/router, many set-top boxes, etc. They used-to have a dominant lead over ARM, selling something like 2/3rds of all embedded CPUs, but they simply fell apart and ceded the market to the competition. They're even the cheaper option... The first $100 Android ICS tablet found in China was MIPS (not ARM) based, and China's ministry of science keeps developing faster MIPS processors for domestic use, including supercomputers.
If they had competed, it might be MIPS in every smart phone. Even now, if they get back on-course, they could pose a real challenge to ARM, and driving prices down, and dividing the market, as Intel is trying to do with little success.
No story that claims to tell how ARM came to dominate is even remotely complete without a good paragraph about how MIPS, their biggest competitor, stopped competing and nearly GAVE them the market.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Except when you include the pofits for making ARM chips from Qualcomn, Apple ( if Apple had actually seperated out their chip making division, ), Samsung, Allwinner etc. that number changes drastically.
The only company making money off Intel chips is Intel there are many companies making ARM chips and you have to include the companies making the chip.
MIPS wasn't just failing to compete, it was in a very rough shape after its largest company left. For a long time MIPS product lines were about faster and faster chips. You can not just take a high performance chip and scale it down easily without a redesign. MIPS did scale down but it took it some time.
Nokia went with ARM because it was tiny, cheap, and low power; perfect for a UI on a handheld and that's what saved ARM more than the Newton did.
Both ARM and MIPS both cover low and high end embedded systems, but ARM started with low end and grew up, whereas MIPS started with higher end and grew down.
They didn't. It grew out of a different project. NetBurst was a dead end.