How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

The market noticed. Nice steady increase. Symbol: ARMH

https://www.google.com/finance?cid=662445

> 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.

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.

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.

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... 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.