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BBC Micro and its evolution to mobile dominance is one of my go-to examples for how a lot of private sector innovations were originally high risk investments su
by nr2x 6y ago
BBC Micro and its evolution to mobile dominance is one of my go-to examples for how a lot of private sector innovations were originally high risk investments subsidized by the public.
- mhh__ 6y agoDoes that make sense? I'm glad it got funded in the first place but the invention of the RISC concept itself seems like one step amongst thousands.
- klelatti 6y agoThat's pretty debatable. The British government never explicitly supported development of Arm technology. Acorn had a commercial arrangement with the BBC and schools bought BBC micros (including Archimedes but also others such as the PCs) but its a stretch to say that Arm was subsidized by the public. Inmos which was a government supported CPU designer at about that time is long gone. If anything the lesson from Arm is that it succeeded because of acute awareness of the commercial needs of its customers - e.g. the addition of Thumb to the ISA - and the need to build an international client base.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoInmos and the transputer morphed into xmos[1] - same basic ideas (the David May[2] connection) but refined, and the programmable gpio is pretty nice - seriously there aren’t many chips where you write your SDRAM controller in software... [1] https://www.xmos.ai/ https://www.xmos.ai/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_May_(computer_scientist)
- klelatti 6y agoInteresting! I used a piece of (financial services) software that used Transputers in the 1990. Today the equivalent software would run on GPUs. Do you know how commercially successful Xmos is?
- frostburg 6y agoI don't know but I have a portable dac from iFi that uses a XMOS processor for some operations. They warn against flashing firmware meant for other XMOS-based dacs, so it must have a certain market share in the segment.
- spacedcowboy 6y agoThey’re doing pretty well in audio, iirc. I tend to use FPGAs for most of the things I’d use an xmos for, but I’m probably not their market. If you want a microcontroller with guaranteed low latency input/output, they’re pretty neat, and the links between chips can be very useful.
- klelatti 6y agoThanks!
- nr2x 6y agoAgree the word subsidy may not be the best, but that The BBC Micro contract changing the trajectory of Acorn as a company is undoubtable.