21–30 of 92 posts
Another 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…
> 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 s…
> 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.
> 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 s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing". I think that's implied when a mainstream news outlet writes about it, and not some tech magazine. > 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. which seems evide…
I mean, I don't expect the general public to care at all about CPU architecture...
With 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 mo…
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 rath…
Can anyone explain why ARM have not been bought by Intel, MS, Apple or Google yet?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Googl…
Imagination did buy MIPS though.
With 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 mo…
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 rath…
[1] https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/48-core-arm-64-bit-ser...
I 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
> The computer powered by the chip that came out of the design was called the Acorn Risc Machine – or ARM. NO NO NO NO NO. The computer was the Acorn Archimedes. The first one I had contained an ARM26. Gah.