Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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 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).
It was still an odd decision to design their own CPU for the successor to the BBC Micro. A more obvious and less risky move would have been to use a 68000 series CPU as a successor to the 6502.
I think it's because there were so many Cambridge academics at Acorn. They made a RISC processor because it was an interesting project which was then at the cutting edge of computer science.
As a note, back in the day Apple stayed afloat by selling its stake in ARM.
Intel's earnings last quarter were $2,630 M compared to $156 M for ARM holdings. So if ARM is "ruling the world" like this story claims, then ruling the world just ain't what it used to be. And I guess that is likely, if semiconductors stagnate as they seem to be.
You mean using a C compiler instead of a Java interpreter helps with speed and power consumption? Who could have thought?
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.
They considered and rejected the 68000 option. The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga were already dominating the market. A 68000-based Acorn system would have no advantages over those while being "late to the game". They figured that they basically needed to leapfrog the 16-bit systems in order to survive.
Unfortunately, by the time the Archimedes came out, the computing world was standardising around the IBM-compatible PC, and even the Archimedes' superior performance compared to PCs of that era (about the time the first 386 systems appeared) couldn't save it (Atari and Commodore didn't fare much better).
The irony is that the (seemingly-harebrained) decision to design their own CPU (thus ensuring incompatibility with everything else on the planet) on a shoe-string budget ended up hitting the jackpot. The "sane" approach of using a popular chip (680x0, 80x86) would have relegated them to the history books, alongside 5.25" floppies and dBase III.
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.
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.