How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
theguardian.com
How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
1–10 of 92 posts
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#2> 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
> 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_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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#3Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#4Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?
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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#5I 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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#6Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?
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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#7I actually didn't know ARM is from England. For whatever reason, I thought the company resides somewhere in Asia.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#8I actually didn't know ARM is from England. For whatever reason, I thought the company resides somewhere in Asia.
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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#9Another 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.
Re: How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing
#10With 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-th...