Is ARM really 40?
Landing on a date for technology launches is sometimes a challenge, and none more so than at the UK processor core designer ARM.
The first ARM processor taped out on 26th April at Acorn in Cambridge, UK. The ARM1 was Acorn’s in-house developed processor, following the success of the BBC Micro home computer. It was developed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber. However this had been in development, both in design and manufacturing, for many months beforehand, and would be many months before the silicon was back in Cambridge.
“It was designed to be inexpensive to manufacture, which resulted in a microprocessor with very low power requirements, making it fundamental to the success of smaller devices,” said Cait Scott, Assistant Curator at the Science Museum in London. “The ARM was used by Apple in their first personal digital assistant, the 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad, and is now found in the majority of smartphones; over 30 billion processors using ARM processor architecture have been produced. Without Sophie Wilson, we wouldn’t have the portable computing power that we have today,” she said.
However the Acorn RISC Machine, the ARM1, had 32bit data but a 26bit address space. While it marks the first use of the instruction set architecture, it is perhaps not really the start of the ARM architecture as the industry knows it.
The first product to use the successor, the ARM2, was the ARM Development System, released in 1986. This system functioned as a second processor for the BBC Master computer and included the ARM2 processor, three supporting chips, 4 MB of RAM, and development tools featuring an enhanced version of BBC BASIC. This provided developers with a platform to explore and harness the capabilities of the architecture.
In 1987, Acorn Computers launched the Archimedes series, the first personal computers to be built on the architecture. These machines incorporated the ARM2 processor and the supporting chipset, delivering significant performance improvements in the personal computing market. The ARM3 processor followed in 1989, introducing a 4 KB cache to the architecture, which further enhanced performance but still with the 26bit address space.
This led to a spinout company, Advanced RISC Machines, with 12 engineers but without Wilson or Furber in 1990 as a joint venture with Apple and chip maker VLSI Technology. Robin Saxby was recruited as the CEO in February 1991 with the model of licensing to chip makers rather than making the chips themselves.
This led to the introduction of the ARM6 in 1991 which fully supported 32bit processing for the first time and included a memory management unit (MMU) to make it a full microprocessor. This was the foundation for the Arm7 processor which then became the flagship design for GSM mobile phones in the mid to late 90s, starting with the Nokia 6110 which was a huge commercial success.
The ARMv7 architecture debuted in 2005 with the Arm Cortex-A8 processor, which was the foundation of the world’s first smartphones in the late 2000s. Around 99 percent of today’s smartphones are built on ARM technology.
ARMv7 significantly expanded single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) extension, commonly known as NEON for more efficient processing of multimedia and signal processing applications.
Saxby retired in 2001 and was replaced by Warren East as CEO until 2013.
This led to the 64bit ARMv8 architecture with Scalable Vector Extension (SVE) in 2011 and ARMv9 in 2021 with SVE2 and Scalable Matrix Extension (SME) extensions for AI.
While SVE in the Armv8 architecture was designed for high performance computing and ML workloads, SVE2 extends the instruction set to enable data processing beyond these domains, covering computer vision, multimedia and AI workloads. For example, SVE2 is present in AI-enabled flagship smartphones built on the latest MediaTek Dimensity 9400 chipset, which incorporates vector instructions to improve video and image processing capabilities, leading to better quality photos and longer-lasting video.
SME accelerates generative AI and common ML workloads, delivering faster, more responsive, intelligent and immersive experiences. It also provides a common instruction set that allows developers to get great performance on their applications and then seamlessly migrate across ecosystems.
ARM also branched out into other areas, from TrustZone and the Confidential Compute Architecture (CCA) provides a reference firmware and software security architecture to support confidential computing requirements. CCA is built on the Realm Management Extension (RME), which secures ‘Realms’ on devices to protect applications and data. While encryption is typically used to protect data in transit and at rest, Realms protect data and code from high privilege software like hypervisors and untrusted peripherals during processing and when in use. These Realms can interact with AI accelerators beyond the CPU and still maintain their integrity.
ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), which is built into Armv9 CPUs, allows developers to find memory-related bugs quickly and efficiently, with 70 percent of all serious security bugs being memory safety issues.
The company was first floated on the London stock exchange in 1998 and was taken private by Japanese group Softbank in 2016 for $32bn. A second flotation in 2023 saw the company valued at $53bn.
Forty years on and the model is evolving from licensing to complete chips.
ARMv9 is the foundation for compute subsystems (CSS) for various technology markets, including consumer technology (ARM CSS for Client), infrastructure (ARM Neoverse CSS) and automotive. These support the development of optimized silicon solutions that are designed to meet specific requirements for particular markets, applications, or consumers. By integrating Armv9 CPU cores, memory, I/O, and interconnect interfaces, ARM CSS enables the rapid development and deployment of optimized, specialized silicon designs that is leading to complete custom chips, starting with Meta, the owner of Facebook. This moves on from the licensing model and is creating waves with ARM’s partners and customers, particularly Qualcomm.
ARM also branched out into physical IP with the acquisition of Artisan IP in 2004 although it is now selling this to Cadence Design Systems.
Forty years on and the original founders at ARM have retired. Wilson is at Broadcom still designing leading edge processors, while Furber is a professor at the University of Manchester developing neural networks the size of the human brain, using ARM chips.
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