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Celebrating ARM's 25th Anniversary With the Visual ARM1 (visual6502.org)
In a slow-burn series of posts going back to 2010, the Visual6502.org has presented diagrams and commentary on "ancient microchips," mosly based on painstaking microphotography after just-as-painstaking depackaging and cleaning of the actual chips.Today, reader trebonian writes an excerpt from their latest entry, in honor of the 25th anniversary of ARM Ltd., UK, which is somewhat different:
To celebrate and honor their amazing work, we present the Visual ARM1, created in collaboration with some of ARM's founding engineers.
Designed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber before there was an ARM Ltd., the Acorn RISC Machine was the first of a line of processors that power our cell phones and tablets today. Unlike our projects based on microscope images, the Visual ARM was created from a resurrected .cif chip layout file, used under our license agreement with ARM. We also photographed one of the few ARM1 chips at very high resolution, and our photograph is featured at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.
Credit goes to ARM founding engineers John Biggs for inspiring the project, discovering the tape, and recovering a usable .cif file, Lee Smith for spotting the variable record format used to encode the file (an artifact of the VMS on Acorn's VAX that at first appeared to be widespread corruption of the file), to Cambridge University Computing Services for reading the Exabyte tape, and to ARM founder Dave Howard for help unraveling the VLSI CIF dialect. Our chip simulation and visualization was developed by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, Ed Spittles, and Greg James.
Designed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber before there was an ARM Ltd., the Acorn RISC Machine was the first of a line of processors that power our cell phones and tablets today. Unlike our projects based on microscope images, the Visual ARM was created from a resurrected .cif chip layout file, used under our license agreement with ARM. We also photographed one of the few ARM1 chips at very high resolution, and our photograph is featured at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.
Credit goes to ARM founding engineers John Biggs for inspiring the project, discovering the tape, and recovering a usable .cif file, Lee Smith for spotting the variable record format used to encode the file (an artifact of the VMS on Acorn's VAX that at first appeared to be widespread corruption of the file), to Cambridge University Computing Services for reading the Exabyte tape, and to ARM founder Dave Howard for help unraveling the VLSI CIF dialect. Our chip simulation and visualization was developed by Barry Silverman, Brian Silverman, Ed Spittles, and Greg James.
Shouldn't there be a link in there somewhere?
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
ok?
I used to program the 3DO a long time ago, they had a 24MHz ARM in it. Definitely an unique architecture.
is that reading and exploiting data that's a mere 25 years old requires almost archeological-like recovery and reconstruction techniques. Compare that to a thousand year old book that's usually pretty much readily readable today.
I think modern society is on a scary path towards massive amnesia in the not-so-long term...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Is that referring to data stored on a magnetic tape using varying record lengths? This used to be pretty common. The first record would be a text file telling you how the rest of the tape was formatted (although sometimes that descriptive "record" was a separate piece of paper attached to the spool).
Ah, those were the days, having to load reel-to-reel tapes by hand, hard drives the size of washing machines...
#DeleteChrome
The fact is that on mobile phones and tablets, Firefox is not displaying any "green on green" link.
The other fact is that a link, which comes at a very competitive price nowadays, could have been added within the article.
Well, the string spelling the link IS inside the article, only it's not marked up as a link.
Ah, all those insensitive TXT clods!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
How many transistors or logic gates does the ARM1 have? How many cycles per instruction? What was the maximum clock frequency?
Many ancient writings are only "readable" in the sense that you can see them, and they appear to possibly be some sort of writing. But interpreting them is either impossible, or it's almost total guesswork.
It's the exact same problem that we see here: the media is accessible, but the interpretation of it is unknown.
That's the hard part. Figuring out just what the fuck the writing actually says, when there's nobody around who natively understands the format of it.
I bought an Acorn Archimedes 305 in 1987, it had an ARM2 CPU at 4/8 MHz. It was one of the first available ARM systems (only preceded by an £4000 expansion box for the Acorn BBC B and a developer version of the Archimedes which was not available to the public), and the first ARM system which was affordable. It came with the Arthur 0.2 Operating System in EPROM, which was later replaced by RISC OS 1.2.
I learned ARM assembly programming from Pete Cockerell's excellent book.
Today, ARM is known for low power consumption, but in the 1980s it's main selling point was its superior speed. At 4.5 MIPS (and up to a whopping 18 MIPS in laboratory conditions), it was running circles around the competition (Intel 80x86 & Motorola 680xx). The Archimedes had software emulation of the 80x86, which ran at IBM-PC/XT speed (in the IBM-PC/AT era). I used this emulator to run WordPerfect and the TopSpeed Modula-2 compiler in MS-DOS for programming assignments at university.
I still have the Acorn Prolog-X box sitting at a honorary place on my bookshelf above my current computer, just out of nostalgia.
/. refugees on Usenet: news:comp.misc
I think the 3Hz visual simulation of the cpu you get to by clicking the image in the article is rather fun. Great way to understand clock cycles and what computing involves.
I want to suck his fingers so badly.
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