The history of ARM architecture began four decades ago, driven by a small team with a great vision: make high performance and low consumption computing for all. Survey of simplicity, elegance and economy, architecture laid the foundations for a new era of efficient and scalable technology.
The result is that over time it has become the most used computer architecture in the worldsurpassing the X86 that supported by Moore’s law and its promoter, Intel, had been dominating client computer science for its enormous implementation on PCs.
The arrival of the era of mobility and the billions of mobile phones, tablets or wearables produced, has achieved a revolution that seemed impossible. This month, ARM officially celebrates its quadge anniversary with a milestone for history: the launch of the number chip number 250,000 million in four decades.
Modest Starts for Arm
In 1978, two talented individuals, Chris Curry and Hermann Hauser, co -founded Acorn Computers, a Startup of humble origins arising in a small corner of Cambridge, a chicken coop, they say. His takeoff began when they obtained a contract to build the BBC Micro, which was part of an initiative of the British government that foresaw that each classroom should have a computer. It was already a triumph for a modest company, but it turned out that this little event I would change the technological panorama forever.
The next step was to build an internal processor, something that its responsible considers unheard of for such a small company. In 1980, two engineers, Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, received the responsibility of designing a 32 -bit processor. Although its progress was hindered by the shortage of resources, the Arm1 He was born in 1985, using only 25,000 transistors in the 3? m process.
The advantages of the chip resided in its great performance, but especially in its Low energy consumptionsomething that has defined ARM architecture until today. It was designed to efficiently execute the instructions of the programs that were executed in Acorn computers, such as text processing, calculations with spreadsheets and graphics rendering. This development and approach laid the foundations of Modern Arm processors.
What began as a project born by necessity quickly became In a new architectural philosophy: Risc. Unlike the complex sets of instructions of the time, RISC allowed optimized and faster processing, just what Acorn needed to overcome the limits of performance. The internal motto of “MIPS for the masses” (millions of instructions per second) differentiated the architecture of other processing designs of the time, more focused on work stations or high -end mains.
The ARM architecture sought energy efficiency, speed and scalability and the first system that showed this new architecture was the Acorn Archimedes, launched in 1987, the first domestic computer of the world based on RISC.
De Acorn a ARM
Acorn crossed financial difficulties in the mid -80s, which led the Olivetti group to its acquisition and finally at the birth of Advanced RISC Machines (ARM LTD) at the end of 1990 as a joint business between Acorn, Apple and VLSI Technology. In 1993, Apple Newton was launched with ARM architecture. The product did not succeed commercially, which led those responsible to understand that your company could not be sustained with a single product.
At that time they introduced a Intellectual Property Business Modelvery uncommon at that time, but that has ended up being key to the current importance. This meant that the ARM processor could graduate numerous companies through an initial rate and subsequent royalties based on the amount of silicon produced.
Mobility leader
ARM signed an agreement with Silicon Texas Instruments provider, who advised Nokia to use her designs on her mobile phones. The Nokia 6110 GSM was a resounding success and the ARM7 processor became the flagship design of the company. It was only the beginning.
Apple, whose experience with ARM designs went back to Acorn’s time, He used these solutions on his iPhone mobiles From its beginnings what the definitive takeoff meant. Google and all the great manufacturers of the Android platform followed the same path and, despite the efforts of other suppliers such as Intel, which had put a blank check to Intel to use X86, the architecture would end up leading the age of mobility.
Nowadays, More than 99% of world smartphones use ARM technology. And almost the same can be said of the tablet market and the wearables, or the embedded and IoT segment where it has a great presence.
PCs and servers in the near future
The Apple Silicon Project, a hardware program that has replaced the X8 Intel processors used in MACs in favor of ARM, has been a great example of a use case and the first viable entry of architecture in the Personal computers.
The idea of bringing ARM to the PCs is not new and the most newspaper is that of Microsoft, since it began to try more than a decade ago with the Surface RT tablet. However, Apple has an experience with ARM that has no semiconductor manufacturer or systems provider and the transition has been a success, marking the way to other suppliers such as Qualcomm that, together with Microsoft, are trying to get a Windows about Variable ARM.
More of the same in servers Where ARM also has great potential. As much as to mark the objective that their CPUS manages to occupy 50% of those used in data centers. The low energy consumption of the platform is key in an era of insatiable resources.
40 years and many more
What Acorn Computer began in the 80s as a variant of RISC and later became Advanced RISC Machinesit’s today a architecture essential for the industry. ARM Holdings has licensing agreements with hundreds of manufacturers and their architecture designs are present in billions of devices.
It is the explanation for a company that does not produce or sell any product has such a high assessment. Suffice it to illustrate it 66,000 million dollars that Nvidia was willing to invest to Buy it and that if concrete would have been one of the largest operations in the technological sector. And it all started in a chicken coop in a small corner of Cambridge.
