If you are reading this article from a smartphone, there is a high probability that it works with an ARM chip. It doesn't matter if it's iPhone or Android. This architecture has become the heart of the smartphone and, thanks to its efficiency and performance, it has also begun to gain ground in the world of laptops.
The origin of ARM, however, dates back to the early days of personal computing. In the early 1980s, the BBC launched a computer literacy project called The BBC Computer Literacy Project. The initiative, promoted by the British government, would be part of a television program that sought to teach how to use computers.
The innovation (and legacy) of Acorn Computers
To fulfill its objective, the BBC had to make available to the public and educational entities the computers needed for learning. To do this, he established a series of requirements and met with several manufacturers to analyze each of his proposals. There were more or less well-known companies, including Sinclair Research, Dragon Data and Acorn Computers.
Acorn had a microcomputer called Atom at the time, but it did not qualify for the project. However, he had been working on a more ambitious proposal for some time, a proposal that would probably end up winning over the BBC, although it used a very different set of instructions to anything known until then.
In the 1989s, much of computing was driven by the complex instruction set, later known as CISC, but instead of going down that inherently complex path, Acorn tried to simplify things. The response to this need was the use of a reduced instruction set (RISC).
BBC Micro
The idea was quite an ambitious one. RISC could dramatically reduce the number of instructions compared to CISC, and would be ideal for handling word processors and spreadsheets. The BBC would end up reaching an agreement with Acorn for the manufacture of the so-called BBC Micropowered by a 1.8 MHz MOS 6502 processor.
Later it was launched BBC Micro Model Bwhich incorporated a proprietary interface called 'Tube' whose functionality was to allow the addition of an additional processor. The system supported several chips of the time, such as the MOS Technology 6502 and Zilog Z80, but also a very peculiar alternative, the first ARM processor called ARM 1.
ARM1 on BBC Micro
The first ARM chip in history, developed by a team of Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, allowed Acorn to have its own British alternative to the popular IBM PC and Apple Macintosh computers in the US market. It was an experimental development that laid the foundations for Acorn Archimedesa personal computer sold with the Arthur operating system later called RISC OS.
Acorn Archimedes A410/1
Despite these advances, Acorn was experiencing a complicated financial present. Two months earlier it had been rescued by Olivetti Group. That movement was the prelude to a much bigger change. Towards the end of 1990, Acorn joined in a joint venture with Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology (now NXP Semiconductors NV) to form Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.
ARM chips were already beginning to show enormous potential for the mobile world, where improvements in dimensions, energy consumption and heat generation were key. In 1993, for example, the Apple Newton embraced this architecture. Although this product was a real failure for the apple company, it left an important lesson for ARM.
Apple Newton (left), Apple iPhone (right)
Robin Saxby, the CEO of Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. had a great idea: the company should set up a de intellectual property business (IP, for its acronym in English). So ARM chips could be licensed to many companies through a license and, if this were not enough, you could receive royalties for the number of processors produced.
This movement led to the ARM architecture reaching a huge market. An agreement with Texas Instruments allowed the most important mobile manufacturer of the moment, NOKIA, to adopt ARM chips in its devices. He NOKIA 6110 It was such a resounding success that the chip it included, the ARM7, also became a success.
Apple A17 Pro and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, two of the most powerful mobile processors on the market
What happened next brings us to the times we currently live in. More and more mobile manufacturers began to adopt this architecture. AND, most smartphones, were born directly with ARM heart. The iPhone, introduced in 2007, had such a processor. It was the 412 MHz APL0098.
Today, you could say that almost all smartphones sold on the market are powered by ARM. The company behind the architecture, currently called ARM Holdings, has more than 6,000 employees. Its intellectual property is not only present on mobile phones, but also on laptops and desktop computers.
The Apple A17 Pro and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, two of the most powerful mobile processors on the market, are based on ARM architecture. These are chips that we can find in the flagships iPhone 15 Pro and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. In computers, ARM has achieved enormous success in Apple equipment since the launch of the prodigious Apple Silicon M1.
Images | ARM | Blake Patterson | Peter Howkins
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