14 ms·

Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor

126 points by reportingsjr 11y ago

ck2 11y ago
Somewhat on topic, I wonder if Acorn makes even a penny from every smartphone made today (at least the non-intel ones). Because that would be a lot of pennies. A true UK success story.
- FigBug 11y ago
  Acorn no longer exists, but ARM does charge royalties for their processor designs. Around 1% - 2.5%. They have revenue was £795.2 in 2014, so yes, that pennies and fractions of a penny do add up. Edit: The cheapest ARM processor I found on Digikey is $0.35, Digikey must be buying them for under $0.15 so that royalties would be under 3/10ths of a cent.
  - kens 11y ago
    Getting back to ck2's comment, ARM Holdings (the company spun off from Acorn to do ARM development) is in Cambridge, so you can count it as a UK success story. It's interesting that they don't make any chips themselves, but are purely an IP company.
    - reportingsjr 11y ago
      Not many companies actually make ICs themselves anymore. A lot of the bigger IC companies you know are fabless: Nvidia, AMD, broadcom, qualcomm, etc. It is simply way, waaay too expensive to operate a fab nowadays.
      - duaneb 11y ago
        How do you operate at the level of nvidia or amd without running your own fab? I'm sure it's mind bogglingly expensive, but the marginal return is surely worth it.
        StringyBob 11y ago
        If you've got a successful (i.e. working well) and fully utilized leading edge fab, it can be more profitable than printing bank notes. However it's so insanely expensive to set up that type of chip manufacture the only way it is really viable now is to share the costs. Samsung, TSMC and Intel (and maybe GF) are the only groups left who can afford it (see http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 ) and you have to keep up the r+d every year to stay competitive...
        wtallis 11y ago
        They have a very close relationship with their preferred foundries and design chips with a specific foundry and process in mind. The big benefit of going fabless is that you don't have to worry so much about keeping your fab busy enough to cover its expenses. Intel's basically the only company that always sells enough of its own chips to keep its fabs busy and profitable.
        rogerbinns 11y ago
        Fabs are very expensive. You can see numbers ranging from 4 to 10 billion dollars each. Those are the fixed costs that you now need to spread over production. It looks like Nvidia does around 20 million chips a year. If a $4bn fab was useful for 4 years, then those fixed costs work out at $50 per chip! If you make other people's chips on the same fab then the per chip costs go down, assuming there is spare capacity. The economies of scale really do help. Which is why there are a few foundries who do most of the chips, and those foundries can spread the costs over a large number of chips including later ones that don't need the newest process. For example Intel is known to do their CPUs on the current process, while doing the chipsets on the older processes. In other words, work out what set of numbers would make sense, and you won't be able to find any. New processes keep getting more expensive, and competitors adopt them too, so you have to sustain your current fab as well as the work to do the next generation one. This requires a lot of available money. Don't build a fab unless you are sure you can use almost all its capacity for the next several years.
        duaneb 11y ago
      - kens 11y ago
        If I understand things correctly, ARM takes things a step further. Not only do they not have a fab, they don't design or sell chips at all. ARM processors are all built and sold by other companies (STMicroelectronics, NXP, TI, etc), using ARM Holdings' IP - the core design (as an abstract netlist) or a license on the instruction set itself.
        striking 11y ago
        ARM designs and licenses chip/core designs, which are then bought by companies that will then further modify them to fit a specific application. They design the chips, but they don't make the entire design.
        dmitrygr 11y ago
        ARM designs the Core STM, NXP, Mediatek, etc buy the core design, slap it on a piece of silicon, design peripherals around it (SATA ports, UARTS, SDIO controllers, etc), slap those on the silicon, put interconnects in between, and sell the complete SoC. This is of course EXTREMELY oversimplified. But the idea is the same: ARM makes the CORE, and others make SoCs out of it. (I am not aware of anyplace you can buy a simple ARM CORE without it being part of an SOC.
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    £795M or £795B ?
    - Narishma 11y ago
      M
    - forinti 11y ago
      £795B would be nearly half the GDP of the UK.
      - agumonkey 11y ago
        I lack knowledge, put this way it looks ridiculous.
  - smcl 11y ago
    Acorn kinda exist but they were rebranded as Element 14 a few years back. In a slightly interesting twist, I own an Element 14 clone of the Beaglebone Black - which is powered by ... you guessed it, an ARM chip (built by TI). You can actually get RISC OS (the original OS for Acorn computers) images for the BBB - http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      I always thought that Element 14 was just a Farnell trading brand.
    - rasz_pl 11y ago
      you are thinking about wrong element 14 acorn one was 'Element 14 Ltd', purchased by Broadcom, now Avago.
to3m 11y ago
Possibly relevant - but in any event, interesting throughout - is Sophie Wilson's Computer History Museum interview: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190
- timthorn 11y ago
  And Steve Furber's Centre for Computing History interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMEBj3FM2aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMEBj3FM2aw
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    dont forget Hermann Hauser, Acorn cofounder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q&list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbWdTB36-_q&index=18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q&list=PLQsxaNhYv8... great stories in this interview
- guiambros 11y ago
  Somewhat related: Micro Men [1], a semi-documentary/drama movie about Sinclair's rivalry against Acorn computers in late 70s and early 80s. Sophie Wilson herself plays a quick cameo role towards the very end. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    They never were in the same space. Sir Clive made things cheap, Acorn made things well.
    - guiambros 11y ago
      Their stories are very interconnected, though. If Christopher Curry hadn't worked for/with Sir Clive for 13+ years and learned about electronic calculators, probably he would have never discovered the upcoming wave of personal computers. Also, it seems that Sir Clive's lack of vision for the future of computers, and his scattered mad-inventor-turned-businessman, were the main reasons for Cambridge Processing Unit Ltd - later Acorn Computers - being created in the first place. Somewhat, the supercomputer we carry in our pockets these days are a direct consequence of Sir Clive's actions (or inactions).
cesarb 11y ago
It's quite interesting that a lack of resources ("given the small size of the design team at Acorn, a simple RISC chip was a practical choice") forced them to focus on simplicity. That simplicity then helped the chip use less power, which later left them well-positioned to capture a large share of a nascent battery-powered market.
- erikpukinskis 11y ago
  Indeed! I think their open source business model had a lot to do with their success too.
moron4hire 11y ago
I think it would be fascinating if some of the older fab processes could be democratized and people could start experimenting with chip fab at home. Perhaps some tech out of the 3D printing field would be adaptable. No, you're not going to make something blazingly fast, but imagine printing your own ATMEGA328P or MSP430 or even 8086 clone.
- 0xcde4c3db 11y ago
  The older fab processes involved some pretty nasty chemicals. I seem to remember that hydrofluoric acid is used in multiple steps (to make contact cuts through oxide layers?) . To give you a broader idea, a former MOS Technology / Commodore fab ended up as a Superfund site [1]. [1] http://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0301146 http://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=03...
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    We have a couple of similar sites here in NL, projected clean up time in the 100's of years. Very bad legacies from the time when the environment wasn't even on the radar of most governments and companies dumped their waste with abandon.
- Gibbon1 11y ago
  I think running mixed lots of wafers is still a thing. However besides still being very expensive the other two issues are the software tools to lay out the chips. And then the cost of making the masks[1]. Friend of mine was working for a startup five years ago I think he said they needed 2.5 million for a small team + initial fab. If you are interested you can get into programming FPGA's for a few grand at most. Far as I can tell looking on the outside of people doing both it's almost the same minus the chip layout manufacturing step. Also the design cycle time is hella faster and cheaper. [1] I have no idea what masks cost now, but 15 years ago the company I worked for needed to change a metal mask and it cost $50k, I think a full set was $250,000.
  - trsohmers 11y ago
offlove 11y ago
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126 points by reportingsjr 11y ago

ck2 11y ago

Somewhat on topic, I wonder if Acorn makes even a penny from every smartphone made today (at least the non-intel ones). Because that would be a lot of pennies. A true UK success story.

FigBug 11y ago
Acorn no longer exists, but ARM does charge royalties for their processor designs. Around 1% - 2.5%. They have revenue was £795.2 in 2014, so yes, that pennies and fractions of a penny do add up. Edit: The cheapest ARM processor I found on Digikey is $0.35, Digikey must be buying them for under $0.15 so that royalties would be under 3/10ths of a cent.
- kens 11y ago
  Getting back to ck2's comment, ARM Holdings (the company spun off from Acorn to do ARM development) is in Cambridge, so you can count it as a UK success story. It's interesting that they don't make any chips themselves, but are purely an IP company.
  - reportingsjr 11y ago
    Not many companies actually make ICs themselves anymore. A lot of the bigger IC companies you know are fabless: Nvidia, AMD, broadcom, qualcomm, etc. It is simply way, waaay too expensive to operate a fab nowadays.
    - duaneb 11y ago
      How do you operate at the level of nvidia or amd without running your own fab? I'm sure it's mind bogglingly expensive, but the marginal return is surely worth it.
      - StringyBob 11y ago
        If you've got a successful (i.e. working well) and fully utilized leading edge fab, it can be more profitable than printing bank notes. However it's so insanely expensive to set up that type of chip manufacture the only way it is really viable now is to share the costs. Samsung, TSMC and Intel (and maybe GF) are the only groups left who can afford it (see http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1327060 ) and you have to keep up the r+d every year to stay competitive...
      - wtallis 11y ago
        They have a very close relationship with their preferred foundries and design chips with a specific foundry and process in mind. The big benefit of going fabless is that you don't have to worry so much about keeping your fab busy enough to cover its expenses. Intel's basically the only company that always sells enough of its own chips to keep its fabs busy and profitable.
      - rogerbinns 11y ago
        Fabs are very expensive. You can see numbers ranging from 4 to 10 billion dollars each. Those are the fixed costs that you now need to spread over production. It looks like Nvidia does around 20 million chips a year. If a $4bn fab was useful for 4 years, then those fixed costs work out at $50 per chip! If you make other people's chips on the same fab then the per chip costs go down, assuming there is spare capacity. The economies of scale really do help. Which is why there are a few foundries who do most of the chips, and those foundries can spread the costs over a large number of chips including later ones that don't need the newest process. For example Intel is known to do their CPUs on the current process, while doing the chipsets on the older processes. In other words, work out what set of numbers would make sense, and you won't be able to find any. New processes keep getting more expensive, and competitors adopt them too, so you have to sustain your current fab as well as the work to do the next generation one. This requires a lot of available money. Don't build a fab unless you are sure you can use almost all its capacity for the next several years.
        duaneb 11y ago
    - kens 11y ago
      If I understand things correctly, ARM takes things a step further. Not only do they not have a fab, they don't design or sell chips at all. ARM processors are all built and sold by other companies (STMicroelectronics, NXP, TI, etc), using ARM Holdings' IP - the core design (as an abstract netlist) or a license on the instruction set itself.
      - striking 11y ago
        ARM designs and licenses chip/core designs, which are then bought by companies that will then further modify them to fit a specific application. They design the chips, but they don't make the entire design.
      - dmitrygr 11y ago
        ARM designs the Core STM, NXP, Mediatek, etc buy the core design, slap it on a piece of silicon, design peripherals around it (SATA ports, UARTS, SDIO controllers, etc), slap those on the silicon, put interconnects in between, and sell the complete SoC. This is of course EXTREMELY oversimplified. But the idea is the same: ARM makes the CORE, and others make SoCs out of it. (I am not aware of anyplace you can buy a simple ARM CORE without it being part of an SOC.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  £795M or £795B ?
  - Narishma 11y ago
    M
  - forinti 11y ago
    £795B would be nearly half the GDP of the UK.
    - agumonkey 11y ago
      I lack knowledge, put this way it looks ridiculous.
- smcl 11y ago
  Acorn kinda exist but they were rebranded as Element 14 a few years back. In a slightly interesting twist, I own an Element 14 clone of the Beaglebone Black - which is powered by ... you guessed it, an ARM chip (built by TI). You can actually get RISC OS (the original OS for Acorn computers) images for the BBB - http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos http://beagleboard.org/project/riscos
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    I always thought that Element 14 was just a Farnell trading brand.
  - rasz_pl 11y ago
    you are thinking about wrong element 14 acorn one was 'Element 14 Ltd', purchased by Broadcom, now Avago.

to3m 11y ago

Possibly relevant - but in any event, interesting throughout - is Sophie Wilson's Computer History Museum interview: http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190 http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102746190

timthorn 11y ago
And Steve Furber's Centre for Computing History interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMEBj3FM2aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMEBj3FM2aw
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  dont forget Hermann Hauser, Acorn cofounder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q&list=PLQsxaNhYv8daKdGi7s85ubzbWdTB36-_q&index=18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0sC3lT313Q&list=PLQsxaNhYv8... great stories in this interview
guiambros 11y ago
Somewhat related: Micro Men [1], a semi-documentary/drama movie about Sinclair's rivalry against Acorn computers in late 70s and early 80s. Sophie Wilson herself plays a quick cameo role towards the very end. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hco_Av2DJ8o
- jacquesm 11y ago
  They never were in the same space. Sir Clive made things cheap, Acorn made things well.
  - guiambros 11y ago
    Their stories are very interconnected, though. If Christopher Curry hadn't worked for/with Sir Clive for 13+ years and learned about electronic calculators, probably he would have never discovered the upcoming wave of personal computers. Also, it seems that Sir Clive's lack of vision for the future of computers, and his scattered mad-inventor-turned-businessman, were the main reasons for Cambridge Processing Unit Ltd - later Acorn Computers - being created in the first place. Somewhat, the supercomputer we carry in our pockets these days are a direct consequence of Sir Clive's actions (or inactions).

cesarb 11y ago

It's quite interesting that a lack of resources ("given the small size of the design team at Acorn, a simple RISC chip was a practical choice") forced them to focus on simplicity. That simplicity then helped the chip use less power, which later left them well-positioned to capture a large share of a nascent battery-powered market.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
Indeed! I think their open source business model had a lot to do with their success too.

moron4hire 11y ago

I think it would be fascinating if some of the older fab processes could be democratized and people could start experimenting with chip fab at home. Perhaps some tech out of the 3D printing field would be adaptable. No, you're not going to make something blazingly fast, but imagine printing your own ATMEGA328P or MSP430 or even 8086 clone.

0xcde4c3db 11y ago
The older fab processes involved some pretty nasty chemicals. I seem to remember that hydrofluoric acid is used in multiple steps (to make contact cuts through oxide layers?) . To give you a broader idea, a former MOS Technology / Commodore fab ended up as a Superfund site [1]. [1] http://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0301146 http://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=03...
- jacquesm 11y ago
  We have a couple of similar sites here in NL, projected clean up time in the 100's of years. Very bad legacies from the time when the environment wasn't even on the radar of most governments and companies dumped their waste with abandon.
Gibbon1 11y ago
I think running mixed lots of wafers is still a thing. However besides still being very expensive the other two issues are the software tools to lay out the chips. And then the cost of making the masks[1]. Friend of mine was working for a startup five years ago I think he said they needed 2.5 million for a small team + initial fab. If you are interested you can get into programming FPGA's for a few grand at most. Far as I can tell looking on the outside of people doing both it's almost the same minus the chip layout manufacturing step. Also the design cycle time is hella faster and cheaper. [1] I have no idea what masks cost now, but 15 years ago the company I worked for needed to change a metal mask and it cost $50k, I think a full set was $250,000.
- trsohmers 11y ago

offlove 11y ago

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