11 ms·

How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

156 points by room271 11y ago

kogepathic 11y ago
> Hands up who knows which company designed the iPhone 6s’ 64-bit chip Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 > Furber and his co-designer, Sophie Wilson, had found research from the Berkeley campus of the University of California into a new type of processor: one that simplified the set of instructions it would follow, in order to enable a sleeker, more efficient design. This style of processing was called “reduced instruction set computing”, or Risc, and the Berkeley Risc designs had been put together by just two people, David Patterson and Carlo Sequin. ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. > By 2007, Intel had abandoned the excesses of the company’s Pentium line Pentium is a brand name, which still exists today. What the author is referring to is Intel's "NetBurst" architecture. > powering the servers at companies like PayPal. Citation needed. The CEO of X-Gene said PayPal has “has deployed and validated” services based on their CPU, but readily admits to having shipped only 10,000 units, which is just peanuts to datacentre guys. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_2015_results/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_201... Overall, I'm happy for ARM's continued success, and I hope that they and the rest of the semiconductor industry will continue to innovate and bring the performance per watt up. That being said, this Guardian article is crap. It's factually incorrect in places, missing sources for claims, and generally doesn't do anything to actually explain why people supposedly don't know who ARM is. tl;dr - Some guys in Cambridge, who are fab-less, made a CPU from a RISC design. They license the designs to partners who can add whatever they want around the CPU (or redesign the CPU as long as they conform to the instruction set, as Apple does). The reason they're "not well known" is because they don't sell CPUs themselves, companies like Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc do.
- sohcahtoa 11y ago
  > ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.
  - tacos 11y ago
    Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.
    - prodmerc 11y ago
      Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-why-how-who/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous. "the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors." Do your damn research, people :-)
      - daemin 11y ago
        Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.
        prodmerc 11y ago
        I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?
randomsearch 11y ago
Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?
- Avshalom 11y ago
  Probably no one thought it was worth it, right up until everyone (particularly shareholders) thought that if they held out for X years it would be a company right up there with IBM, Intel, Apple, MS, Google at the top of the tech food chain.
- cstross 11y ago
  The success of ARM's strategy is based on them being an impartial supplier of designs that facilitate low power consumption and some degree of interoperability at the assembler level. If anyone buys it, they kill the goose that lays the golden egg. All those corporations run their own vertically integrated stack to some extent -- if you were Apple, would you be willing to trust an ARM design licensed from MS or Google? (Or Intel, when the whole point of Apple's CPU strategy going back 22-25 years is to be mostly CPU-independent after getting burned twice in a row by MC680x0 and then PowerPC)? If you were Samsung, would you license an ARM design from Apple-owned ARM? And so on.
  - zump 11y ago
    Imagination did buy MIPS though.
    - zurn 11y ago
      MIPS was almost dead then though. They weren't bought out because they seemed successful. Possibly a hedging move against ARM's dominance.
  - Andaith 11y ago
    Interesting, I'd assume the opposite. If you're apple, and you're licensing ARM designs, can you risk Google or Microsoft, or Oracle buying ARM? Can you risk them changing the licensing terms, or stop licensing altogether? How come none of them want to be the first to buy, securing their rights to ARM, and instead enjoy the risk of a competitor buying ARM?
ThePhysicist 11y ago
I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". Competitors and people working in the chip industry have probably been well aware of the ARM architecture and its rise for a long time. In addition, some factors that are responsible for the huge success of this architecture have probably been historical accidents as well, in the sense that a different architecture might have been capable of taking ARMs place, but the adoption of ARM by some large tech companies and the explosion of the smartphone market made things move really fast in favor of that platform. In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally. It's probably sure that even now many companies that are almost unknown to the general public are working on technologies and products that will change entire markets in the future.
- diqu 11y ago
  > I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". I think that's implied when a mainstream news outlet writes about it, and not some tech magazine. > In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally. which seems evident, here. ARM becomes dominant -> Guardian writes about it -> the general public learns about it.
  - bpicolo 11y ago
    I mean, I don't expect the general public to care at all about CPU architecture...
    - 0942v8653 11y ago
      It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge difference when they are compatible, but this time it is a big deal.
runn1ng 11y ago
I actually didn't know ARM is from England. For whatever reason, I thought the company resides somewhere in Asia.
- rzzzt 11y ago
  I recommend watching "Micro Men", a drama/documentary depicting the early days of Acorn and the battle with Sinclair for producing the BBC's official microcomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
  - sambeau 11y ago
    If you watch carefully you can see Sophie Wilson serving behind the bar in the pub.
  - matt2000 11y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o for anyone interested in checking it out.
- ks 11y ago
  Actually ARM also has an office in Trondheim, Norway that is behind the Mali GPU (700 million processors sold in a single year)
- Angostura 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
leonroy 11y ago
Another related British company which has become very successful without anyone noticing is Imagination Technologies (formerly Videologic). They had a successful graphics card business during the 90s but with the introduction of 3D graphics accelerators their product (PowerVR) whilst semi-successful began to struggle against 3dfx and nVidia's TNT and Geforce range of graphics cards. Eventually they pulled out of the standalone graphics market and pottered around producing speakers and radios. They had a few sucesses like winning the Sega Dreamcast bid from 3dfx but I believe it wasn't until the need to have powerful and low power graphics chips in phones that the PowerVR's very efficient rendering technology pushed Imagination back into the fore. Their graphics chips nowadays can be found powering most smartphones and tablets. Very interesting company and a very interesting past.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC's but they yearly revenue is below 200M and they operate at break even or a loss. IT seems to be a case study of a company which it's IP is a corner stone in many consumer devices but some how never managed to capitalize on it. ARM is a very good example of how to spin off your IP and make it successful even when your actual business (Acorn) is going bust.
  - orf 11y ago
    > I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC I would consider any company who's tech ships in a billion devices successful, regardless of if they have managed to capitalize on it.
    - BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
      I think "company" was the operative word there. They are certainly successful technologists, but perhaps not a success as a company.
  - leonroy 11y ago
RockyMcNuts 11y ago
With Intel skipping a 'tick' and fabs like Samsung and TSMC catching up in process, ARM-based CPUs are competitive in performance with the low end of Intel's desktop lines up to Core i5 - and use less power. There seems to be a window for ARM to make inroads into servers, in addition to low-end laptops like Chromebooks. The trend of mobile devices replacing desktops for more and more tasks (> 50% of emails read on mobile, only 10% of people desktop-only) bodes poorly for Wintel. One could foresee an era where one can add a keyboard and big screen to a mobile device like an iPad Pro, and most folks no longer use desktops at all. Phones migrate up to replace desktops, PCs migrate up to the cloud. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-the-pc_1_b_8613602.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-th...
- dogma1138 11y ago
  ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks.html http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_tegrak1_preview&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rather than the pure CPU. So far it seems that Intel's bet was correct it will take them just as much time to reduce x86 (Skylake/Core-M, Bay-Trail/Cherry Trail/Willow Trail) power consumption to ARM SOC levels as it would take ARM SOC's to come close to x86 performance, and Intel will still win at the end. Keep in mind that in 2007-2008 Intel was very seriously considering licensing ARM and other technologies to compete in the ultra portable and mobile markets and we are all better off that it didn't do so. Intel now has offerings which are better or comparable to ARM based SOC's without fragmenting the ARM ecosystem even further and with having another avenue of technologies and intellectual property to keep the competition going and to offer an alternative to ARM/RISC with both the ability to streamline transition and having a fall back option which is always needed. An all ARM ecosystem is just as bad (or even worse since unlike x86 it doesn't guarantee compatibility) as a monopolized x86 one. We should also be quite thankful to ARM and it's users as they have been the driving force behind much of Intel's work lately as AMD was not really offering competition since the old Athlon-X64 days. The new Core-M7 offers 2 cores at a boost clock of 3.1ghz, and a 1ghz GPU and beat every ARM SOC out there in terms of performance especially in places where it actually counts while having a TDP of 4.5W which is comparable to high end SOC's like Apple's A9x/A8x and considerably lower than the NVIDIA high end offering although that one blows everything out of the water when it comes to graphical performance as it has desktop GPU core's in it.
andmarios 11y ago
The article is interesting and I think that the title and the closing sentence aren't doing it justice. It is the default for any company that produces non end-user electronics to stay in the background. Most people don't know who build their RAM chips, or the capacitors on their motherboards or even who built their motherboard. How many people even on HN know the brand of their laptop's HDD or RAM? Intel is the exception, in that they recognized early the value of a brand name and did everything they could to make theirs known. It is hard for newer generations to understand, but at the dawn of the PC era no one cared much about the CPU brand. Intel gave discounts to manufacturers who used the “intel inside” sticker along with many other promotional actions in order for their product to become important in the eyes of the consumer.
mst 11y ago
> The computer powered by the chip that came out of the design was called the Acorn Risc Machine – or ARM. NO NO NO NO NO. The computer was the Acorn Archimedes. The first one I had contained an ARM26. Gah.
- gjvc 11y ago
  Correct. This was England's last hope in the computer market.
  - m-i-l 11y ago
    Or the INMOS transputer[0] based Abaq (which later became the Atari Transputer Workstation[1]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INMOS_transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INMOS_transputer [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation
ksec 11y ago
Paypal using ARM server? I didn't know that. I would actually love someone explain to me why ARM server is an attractive option. When Intel launched the recent Xeon-D i thought there isn't really any incentive to go to ARM CPU server.
qyv 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ Steve Furber on the creation of ARM, quite interesting.
ddingus 11y ago
I'm a fan of ARM for it's power / performance characteristics, and for the market competition it's bringing for Intel. (who needs it) One concern I have is the overall expectations on ARM are more locked down than Intel. Look at Microsoft and it's ARM Tablet. Locked down, Win 8 App Store only. Android is largely locked down, unless you jailbreak, or get a development / standalone PC board or system. The more prominent ARM devices do not offer the flexibility and openness your average Intel PC does. Legacy software is a big part of what I see as keeping that door open. This latest round of Intel PC's is notable for the lack of documentation and or options to configure them to boot other things. [1] Not like it can't be done, but it's painfully obvious the only reason it can be done is the vendor left the option there. They don't have to, and I get the feeling nobody really does want to. They just feel it makes sense right now for legacy software reasons. At some point, that equation will change... [1] - Case in point, a recent HP consumer grade laptop. Got it, and it had Windows 8 on it, which at the time didn't make any sense for the use case it was purchased for. There was no meaningful documentation on how to enter the BIOS to set "LEGACY" mode. I literally poked around on the keys, until I found it. Scary. The idea of, "they didn't even have to provide that" hit home right then.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
As with most things I think the success of ARM has less to do with its chips or architecture and more to do with its business model and the competition. For decades the combined power of Intel's volume and Window's ubiquity kept a huge amount of resources dedicated to that platform. SPARC, M68K, NS32, VAX, PA-RISC, even Itanium were crushed under the unrelenting focus by third parties on building tools, software, and systems around x86 and later AMD64 architecture chips. What is fascinating is that Intel got into that position by being open, there were no fewer than 12 licensees for its 8086 design, and people had supplanted "expensive, proprietary lock-in" type architectures with more open and cheaper chips. It was the emergence of the PC market, and the great Chip Recession of 1984, where Intel decided if it was going to stay a chip maker, it had to be the best source of its dominant computer chips. I was at Intel at the time and it shifted from partnering, to competing, with the same people who had licensed its chips, with the intent of "reclaiming" the market for CPU chips for itself. You have to realize that at the time the bottom had fallen out of the market, and things like EPROMs and DRAM (both of which Intel made) were being sold on the grey market at below market costs as stocks from bankrupt computer companies made it into the wild. Further competitors like Ok Semiconductor were making better versions of the same chips (lower power, faster clock rates). Intel still had a manufacturing advantage but it could not survive if it couldn't make the margins on its chips hold. It dumped all of its unproductive lines, wrapped patents and licenses around all of its core chips, and then embarked on a long term strategy to kill anyone who wouldn't buy their chips from Intel at the prices that Intel demanded. We can see they were remarkably successful at that, and a series of CEOs have presided over a manufacturing powerhouse that was funded by an unassailable capture of not only software developers but system OEMs as well. They fended off a number of anti-trust lawsuits, and delicately wove their way between former partners like Compaq who were now laying on the ground, mortally wounded. ARM was playing in the embedded space, dominated by the 8051 (an Intel chip) where Intel played the licensing card (just like ARM) licensing its architecture to others who would make their own versions of the chips. As a licensing play they insured their partners would never move "up market" into the desktop space and threaten the cash cow that was x86. The relentless pace of putting more transistors into less space drove an interesting problem for ARM. When you get a process shrink you can do one of two things, you can cut your costs (more die per wafer), or you can keep your costs about the same and increase features (more transistors per die). And the truth is you always did a bit of both. But the challenge with chips is their macro scale parts (the pin pads for example) really couldn't shrink. So you became "pad limited". The ratio of the area dedicated to the pads (which you connected external wires too) and the transistors could not drop below the point where most of your wafer was "pad". If it did so then you're costs flipped and your expensive manufacturing process was producing wafers of mostly pads so not utilizing its capabilities. At the Microprocessor Forum in 2001 the keynote suggested that spending anything more than 10% of your silicon budget on pads was too much. 90+% of your die had to be functional logic or the shrink just didn't make sense. The effect of that was that chips ARM designed really had to do more stuff or they were not going to be cost effective on any silicon process with small feature sizes. And the simplest choice is to add more "big processor" features or additional peripherals. So we had an explosion of "system on chip" products with all sorts of peripherals that continues to this day. And the process feature size keeps getting smaller, and the stuff added keeps growing. The ARM core was so small it could accommodate more peripherals on the same die, that made it cost effective and that made it a good choice for phones which needed long battery life but low cost. The age of phones put everything except the radios on chips (radios being like modems, different for every country, were not cost effective to add to the chip until software defined radio (SDR) became a thing. And the success as a phone platform pushed the need for tools, and the need for tools got more of the computer ecosystem focussed on building things for the ARM instruction set. At that point step two became inevitable. Phones got better and better and more computer like, they need more and more of the things that "desktop" type computers need. You have a supplier (ARM) which is not trying to protect an entrenched business basically doing all it can to widen its markets. And a company like Apple, who wasn't trying to protect its desktop/laptop market share pushing the architecture as far as it can. More tools, more focus, more investment from others to support it, and like a fire that starts as a glowing ember near a convenient source of tinder, the blaze grows until the effects of the fire are creating its own wind and allowing it to grow bigger and stronger. Even after Intel woke up to the fact that the forest around their x86 architecture was on fire, I don't think they had enough time to put it out. So here we are with ARM chips which are comparable in software support and feature set of Intel's low end desktop CPUs. But without the Intel "tax" which is the extra margin Intel could demand being the only player, and immune to Intel's ability to attack by patents or license shenanigans. Intel is in full on defense, paying tablet vendors like Lenovo to use their chips in ARM tablets, supporting the cost of building out their own IoT infrastructure with Galileo, and doing all they can to keep ARM out of their castle, the data center. Like DEC and its VAX line, or Sun and its SPARC line, they are doomed. Looking at the performance of the iPad pro it is pretty clear you can build a chromebook or a laptop that would meet the needs of the mass market with an ARM architecture machine. And because ARM licensees can add features anywhere in the architecture including places like the frontside bus[1] which is tightly controlled space in x86 land, you will be able to provide features faster than x86 OEMs can convince Intel they need them. And that will change things in a pretty profound (and I think positive) way. Not the least of which might be having the opportunity to buy a lap top that isn't pre-backdoored by the chip manufacturer with its SMM. [1] Literally if you buy a bus analyzer (a sophisticated logic analyzer) from Agilent or Tektronix and hook it to the Intel frontside bus, it won't display the signals until you enter the NDA # you got from Intel! That is pretty tightly controlled.

156 points by room271 11y ago

> Hands up who knows which company designed the iPhone 6s’ 64-bit chip Apple did. It's been widely acknowledged that the processor inside the iPhone is a custom design which implements the ARMv8 ISA. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 > Furber and his co-designer, Sophie Wilson, had found research from the Berkeley campus of the University of California into a new type of processor: one that simplified the set of instructions it would follow, in order to enable a sleeker, more efficient design. This style of processing was called “reduced instruction set computing”, or Risc, and the Berkeley Risc designs had been put together by just two people, David Patterson and Carlo Sequin. ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. > By 2007, Intel had abandoned the excesses of the company’s Pentium line Pentium is a brand name, which still exists today. What the author is referring to is Intel's "NetBurst" architecture. > powering the servers at companies like PayPal. Citation needed. The CEO of X-Gene said PayPal has “has deployed and validated” services based on their CPU, but readily admits to having shipped only 10,000 units, which is just peanuts to datacentre guys. Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_2015_results/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/29/aookied_micro_q4_201... Overall, I'm happy for ARM's continued success, and I hope that they and the rest of the semiconductor industry will continue to innovate and bring the performance per watt up. That being said, this Guardian article is crap. It's factually incorrect in places, missing sources for claims, and generally doesn't do anything to actually explain why people supposedly don't know who ARM is. tl;dr - Some guys in Cambridge, who are fab-less, made a CPU from a RISC design. They license the designs to partners who can add whatever they want around the CPU (or redesign the CPU as long as they conform to the instruction set, as Apple does). The reason they're "not well known" is because they don't sell CPUs themselves, companies like Apple, Qualcomm, MediaTek, etc do.

sohcahtoa 11y ago
> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM. Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000. Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.
- tacos 11y ago
  Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.
  - prodmerc 11y ago
    Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-why-how-who/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous. "the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors." Do your damn research, people :-)
    - daemin 11y ago
      Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.
      - prodmerc 11y ago
        I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?

randomsearch 11y ago

Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?

Avshalom 11y ago
Probably no one thought it was worth it, right up until everyone (particularly shareholders) thought that if they held out for X years it would be a company right up there with IBM, Intel, Apple, MS, Google at the top of the tech food chain.
cstross 11y ago
The success of ARM's strategy is based on them being an impartial supplier of designs that facilitate low power consumption and some degree of interoperability at the assembler level. If anyone buys it, they kill the goose that lays the golden egg. All those corporations run their own vertically integrated stack to some extent -- if you were Apple, would you be willing to trust an ARM design licensed from MS or Google? (Or Intel, when the whole point of Apple's CPU strategy going back 22-25 years is to be mostly CPU-independent after getting burned twice in a row by MC680x0 and then PowerPC)? If you were Samsung, would you license an ARM design from Apple-owned ARM? And so on.
- zump 11y ago
  Imagination did buy MIPS though.
  - zurn 11y ago
    MIPS was almost dead then though. They weren't bought out because they seemed successful. Possibly a hedging move against ARM's dominance.
- Andaith 11y ago
  Interesting, I'd assume the opposite. If you're apple, and you're licensing ARM designs, can you risk Google or Microsoft, or Oracle buying ARM? Can you risk them changing the licensing terms, or stop licensing altogether? How come none of them want to be the first to buy, securing their rights to ARM, and instead enjoy the risk of a competitor buying ARM?

ThePhysicist 11y ago

I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". Competitors and people working in the chip industry have probably been well aware of the ARM architecture and its rise for a long time. In addition, some factors that are responsible for the huge success of this architecture have probably been historical accidents as well, in the sense that a different architecture might have been capable of taking ARMs place, but the adoption of ARM by some large tech companies and the explosion of the smartphone market made things move really fast in favor of that platform. In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally. It's probably sure that even now many companies that are almost unknown to the general public are working on technologies and products that will change entire markets in the future.

diqu 11y ago
> I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". I think that's implied when a mainstream news outlet writes about it, and not some tech magazine. > In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally. which seems evident, here. ARM becomes dominant -> Guardian writes about it -> the general public learns about it.
- bpicolo 11y ago
  I mean, I don't expect the general public to care at all about CPU architecture...
  - 0942v8653 11y ago
    It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge difference when they are compatible, but this time it is a big deal.

runn1ng 11y ago

I actually didn't know ARM is from England. For whatever reason, I thought the company resides somewhere in Asia.

rzzzt 11y ago
I recommend watching "Micro Men", a drama/documentary depicting the early days of Acorn and the battle with Sinclair for producing the BBC's official microcomputer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
- sambeau 11y ago
  If you watch carefully you can see Sophie Wilson serving behind the bar in the pub.
- matt2000 11y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o for anyone interested in checking it out.
ks 11y ago
Actually ARM also has an office in Trondheim, Norway that is behind the Mali GPU (700 million processors sold in a single year)
Angostura 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

leonroy 11y ago

Another related British company which has become very successful without anyone noticing is Imagination Technologies (formerly Videologic). They had a successful graphics card business during the 90s but with the introduction of 3D graphics accelerators their product (PowerVR) whilst semi-successful began to struggle against 3dfx and nVidia's TNT and Geforce range of graphics cards. Eventually they pulled out of the standalone graphics market and pottered around producing speakers and radios. They had a few sucesses like winning the Sega Dreamcast bid from 3dfx but I believe it wasn't until the need to have powerful and low power graphics chips in phones that the PowerVR's very efficient rendering technology pushed Imagination back into the fore. Their graphics chips nowadays can be found powering most smartphones and tablets. Very interesting company and a very interesting past.

dogma1138 11y ago
I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC's but they yearly revenue is below 200M and they operate at break even or a loss. IT seems to be a case study of a company which it's IP is a corner stone in many consumer devices but some how never managed to capitalize on it. ARM is a very good example of how to spin off your IP and make it successful even when your actual business (Acorn) is going bust.
- orf 11y ago
  > I wouldn't call Imagination Technologies a successful company their IP is being shipped in billion of SOC I would consider any company who's tech ships in a billion devices successful, regardless of if they have managed to capitalize on it.
  - BHSPitMonkey 11y ago
    I think "company" was the operative word there. They are certainly successful technologists, but perhaps not a success as a company.
- leonroy 11y ago

RockyMcNuts 11y ago

With Intel skipping a 'tick' and fabs like Samsung and TSMC catching up in process, ARM-based CPUs are competitive in performance with the low end of Intel's desktop lines up to Core i5 - and use less power. There seems to be a window for ARM to make inroads into servers, in addition to low-end laptops like Chromebooks. The trend of mobile devices replacing desktops for more and more tasks (> 50% of emails read on mobile, only 10% of people desktop-only) bodes poorly for Wintel. One could foresee an era where one can add a keyboard and big screen to a mobile device like an iPad Pro, and most folks no longer use desktops at all. Phones migrate up to replace desktops, PCs migrate up to the cloud. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-the-pc_1_b_8613602.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/druce-vertes-cfa/the-end-of-th...

dogma1138 11y ago
ARM CPU's aren't really comparable to anything above the Intel's ATOM line in terms of benchmark performance, and raw real world applications still give x86 based CPU's a huge advantage. http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks.html http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks... http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_tegrak1_preview&num=1 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia_te... Allot of the "performance" of most of these SOC's actually comes from the GPU/DSP portion of the SOC rather than the pure CPU. So far it seems that Intel's bet was correct it will take them just as much time to reduce x86 (Skylake/Core-M, Bay-Trail/Cherry Trail/Willow Trail) power consumption to ARM SOC levels as it would take ARM SOC's to come close to x86 performance, and Intel will still win at the end. Keep in mind that in 2007-2008 Intel was very seriously considering licensing ARM and other technologies to compete in the ultra portable and mobile markets and we are all better off that it didn't do so. Intel now has offerings which are better or comparable to ARM based SOC's without fragmenting the ARM ecosystem even further and with having another avenue of technologies and intellectual property to keep the competition going and to offer an alternative to ARM/RISC with both the ability to streamline transition and having a fall back option which is always needed. An all ARM ecosystem is just as bad (or even worse since unlike x86 it doesn't guarantee compatibility) as a monopolized x86 one. We should also be quite thankful to ARM and it's users as they have been the driving force behind much of Intel's work lately as AMD was not really offering competition since the old Athlon-X64 days. The new Core-M7 offers 2 cores at a boost clock of 3.1ghz, and a 1ghz GPU and beat every ARM SOC out there in terms of performance especially in places where it actually counts while having a TDP of 4.5W which is comparable to high end SOC's like Apple's A9x/A8x and considerably lower than the NVIDIA high end offering although that one blows everything out of the water when it comes to graphical performance as it has desktop GPU core's in it.

andmarios 11y ago

The article is interesting and I think that the title and the closing sentence aren't doing it justice. It is the default for any company that produces non end-user electronics to stay in the background. Most people don't know who build their RAM chips, or the capacitors on their motherboards or even who built their motherboard. How many people even on HN know the brand of their laptop's HDD or RAM? Intel is the exception, in that they recognized early the value of a brand name and did everything they could to make theirs known. It is hard for newer generations to understand, but at the dawn of the PC era no one cared much about the CPU brand. Intel gave discounts to manufacturers who used the “intel inside” sticker along with many other promotional actions in order for their product to become important in the eyes of the consumer.

mst 11y ago

> The computer powered by the chip that came out of the design was called the Acorn Risc Machine – or ARM. NO NO NO NO NO. The computer was the Acorn Archimedes. The first one I had contained an ARM26. Gah.

gjvc 11y ago
Correct. This was England's last hope in the computer market.
- m-i-l 11y ago
  Or the INMOS transputer[0] based Abaq (which later became the Atari Transputer Workstation[1]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INMOS_transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INMOS_transputer [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Transputer_Workstation

ksec 11y ago

Paypal using ARM server? I didn't know that. I would actually love someone explain to me why ARM server is an attractive option. When Intel launched the recent Xeon-D i thought there isn't really any incentive to go to ARM CPU server.

qyv 11y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jOJl8gRPyQ Steve Furber on the creation of ARM, quite interesting.

ddingus 11y ago

I'm a fan of ARM for it's power / performance characteristics, and for the market competition it's bringing for Intel. (who needs it) One concern I have is the overall expectations on ARM are more locked down than Intel. Look at Microsoft and it's ARM Tablet. Locked down, Win 8 App Store only. Android is largely locked down, unless you jailbreak, or get a development / standalone PC board or system. The more prominent ARM devices do not offer the flexibility and openness your average Intel PC does. Legacy software is a big part of what I see as keeping that door open. This latest round of Intel PC's is notable for the lack of documentation and or options to configure them to boot other things. [1] Not like it can't be done, but it's painfully obvious the only reason it can be done is the vendor left the option there. They don't have to, and I get the feeling nobody really does want to. They just feel it makes sense right now for legacy software reasons. At some point, that equation will change... [1] - Case in point, a recent HP consumer grade laptop. Got it, and it had Windows 8 on it, which at the time didn't make any sense for the use case it was purchased for. There was no meaningful documentation on how to enter the BIOS to set "LEGACY" mode. I literally poked around on the keys, until I found it. Scary. The idea of, "they didn't even have to provide that" hit home right then.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

As with most things I think the success of ARM has less to do with its chips or architecture and more to do with its business model and the competition. For decades the combined power of Intel's volume and Window's ubiquity kept a huge amount of resources dedicated to that platform. SPARC, M68K, NS32, VAX, PA-RISC, even Itanium were crushed under the unrelenting focus by third parties on building tools, software, and systems around x86 and later AMD64 architecture chips. What is fascinating is that Intel got into that position by being open, there were no fewer than 12 licensees for its 8086 design, and people had supplanted "expensive, proprietary lock-in" type architectures with more open and cheaper chips. It was the emergence of the PC market, and the great Chip Recession of 1984, where Intel decided if it was going to stay a chip maker, it had to be the best source of its dominant computer chips. I was at Intel at the time and it shifted from partnering, to competing, with the same people who had licensed its chips, with the intent of "reclaiming" the market for CPU chips for itself. You have to realize that at the time the bottom had fallen out of the market, and things like EPROMs and DRAM (both of which Intel made) were being sold on the grey market at below market costs as stocks from bankrupt computer companies made it into the wild. Further competitors like Ok Semiconductor were making better versions of the same chips (lower power, faster clock rates). Intel still had a manufacturing advantage but it could not survive if it couldn't make the margins on its chips hold. It dumped all of its unproductive lines, wrapped patents and licenses around all of its core chips, and then embarked on a long term strategy to kill anyone who wouldn't buy their chips from Intel at the prices that Intel demanded. We can see they were remarkably successful at that, and a series of CEOs have presided over a manufacturing powerhouse that was funded by an unassailable capture of not only software developers but system OEMs as well. They fended off a number of anti-trust lawsuits, and delicately wove their way between former partners like Compaq who were now laying on the ground, mortally wounded. ARM was playing in the embedded space, dominated by the 8051 (an Intel chip) where Intel played the licensing card (just like ARM) licensing its architecture to others who would make their own versions of the chips. As a licensing play they insured their partners would never move "up market" into the desktop space and threaten the cash cow that was x86. The relentless pace of putting more transistors into less space drove an interesting problem for ARM. When you get a process shrink you can do one of two things, you can cut your costs (more die per wafer), or you can keep your costs about the same and increase features (more transistors per die). And the truth is you always did a bit of both. But the challenge with chips is their macro scale parts (the pin pads for example) really couldn't shrink. So you became "pad limited". The ratio of the area dedicated to the pads (which you connected external wires too) and the transistors could not drop below the point where most of your wafer was "pad". If it did so then you're costs flipped and your expensive manufacturing process was producing wafers of mostly pads so not utilizing its capabilities. At the Microprocessor Forum in 2001 the keynote suggested that spending anything more than 10% of your silicon budget on pads was too much. 90+% of your die had to be functional logic or the shrink just didn't make sense. The effect of that was that chips ARM designed really had to do more stuff or they were not going to be cost effective on any silicon process with small feature sizes. And the simplest choice is to add more "big processor" features or additional peripherals. So we had an explosion of "system on chip" products with all sorts of peripherals that continues to this day. And the process feature size keeps getting smaller, and the stuff added keeps growing. The ARM core was so small it could accommodate more peripherals on the same die, that made it cost effective and that made it a good choice for phones which needed long battery life but low cost. The age of phones put everything except the radios on chips (radios being like modems, different for every country, were not cost effective to add to the chip until software defined radio (SDR) became a thing. And the success as a phone platform pushed the need for tools, and the need for tools got more of the computer ecosystem focussed on building things for the ARM instruction set. At that point step two became inevitable. Phones got better and better and more computer like, they need more and more of the things that "desktop" type computers need. You have a supplier (ARM) which is not trying to protect an entrenched business basically doing all it can to widen its markets. And a company like Apple, who wasn't trying to protect its desktop/laptop market share pushing the architecture as far as it can. More tools, more focus, more investment from others to support it, and like a fire that starts as a glowing ember near a convenient source of tinder, the blaze grows until the effects of the fire are creating its own wind and allowing it to grow bigger and stronger. Even after Intel woke up to the fact that the forest around their x86 architecture was on fire, I don't think they had enough time to put it out. So here we are with ARM chips which are comparable in software support and feature set of Intel's low end desktop CPUs. But without the Intel "tax" which is the extra margin Intel could demand being the only player, and immune to Intel's ability to attack by patents or license shenanigans. Intel is in full on defense, paying tablet vendors like Lenovo to use their chips in ARM tablets, supporting the cost of building out their own IoT infrastructure with Galileo, and doing all they can to keep ARM out of their castle, the data center. Like DEC and its VAX line, or Sun and its SPARC line, they are doomed. Looking at the performance of the iPad pro it is pretty clear you can build a chromebook or a laptop that would meet the needs of the mass market with an ARM architecture machine. And because ARM licensees can add features anywhere in the architecture including places like the frontside bus[1] which is tightly controlled space in x86 land, you will be able to provide features faster than x86 OEMs can convince Intel they need them. And that will change things in a pretty profound (and I think positive) way. Not the least of which might be having the opportunity to buy a lap top that isn't pre-backdoored by the chip manufacturer with its SMM. [1] Literally if you buy a bus analyzer (a sophisticated logic analyzer) from Agilent or Tektronix and hook it to the Intel frontside bus, it won't display the signals until you enter the NDA # you got from Intel! That is pretty tightly controlled.