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What’s in your opinion the reason Arm became the defacto choice for embedded systems? (And now making ways to general computing) In what ways was it so much be
by noncoml 6y ago
What’s in your opinion the reason Arm became the defacto choice for embedded systems? (And now making ways to general computing)
In what ways was it so much better than MIPS that it virtually wiped it off the board?
- klelatti 6y agoYou can hear it from John Hennessey of MIPS fame himself. "We made a mistake. We didn't realise how important the cellphone market was" https://youtu.be/3paiCK3dlK0?t=3016 https://youtu.be/3paiCK3dlK0?t=3016
- noncoml 6y agoVery interesting, thanks. The guy to the right of him is completely in denial. He was so confident MIPS "will win in the end"
- klelatti 6y agoInterestingly, I think Arm has become more MIPs like over the years - dropping some of the features that made it distinctive. In the 'Arm edition' of the Patterson and Hennessey book there is a slightly wistful comment that Arm now looks a lot like the original MIPS - so maybe MIPS has won after all!
- klelatti 6y agoJust to add on a more detailed level I think it was Thumb with its better code density that first got them into (Nokia) cellphones. Also, I think Arm long explicitly avoided competing with Intel which they saw (then) correctly as a losing strategy.
- jononor 6y agoThe fact that many semiconductor different companies brought ARM based products to market, each with their own set of peripherals, hardware reference designs and SDKs targeting different verticals (in different ways). This huge variety of available off-the-shelf designs makes it possible to make cost-effective products with low investments and fast time-to-market. A CPU core alone is not enough, one needs the ecosystem and ARM understood that from very early on.