How ARM got so successful without the public really noticing

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.

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.

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.

NO NO NO NO NO.

The computer was the Acorn Archimedes.

The first one I had contained an ARM26.

Gah.

One concern I have is the overall expectations on ARM are more locked down than Intel. Look at Microsoft and it's ARM Tablet. Locked down, Win 8 App Store only. Android is largely locked down, unless you jailbreak, or get a development / standalone PC board or system.

The more prominent ARM devices do not offer the flexibility and openness your average Intel PC does.

Legacy software is a big part of what I see as keeping that door open. This latest round of Intel PC's is notable for the lack of documentation and or options to configure them to boot other things. [1] Not like it can't be done, but it's painfully obvious the only reason it can be done is the vendor left the option there.

They don't have to, and I get the feeling nobody really does want to. They just feel it makes sense right now for legacy software reasons. At some point, that equation will change...

[1] - Case in point, a recent HP consumer grade laptop. Got it, and it had Windows 8 on it, which at the time didn't make any sense for the use case it was purchased for. There was no meaningful documentation on how to enter the BIOS to set "LEGACY" mode. I literally poked around on the keys, until I found it. Scary. The idea of, "they didn't even have to provide that" hit home right then.

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...

For decades the combined power of Intel's volume and Window's ubiquity kept a huge amount of resources dedicated to that platform. SPARC, M68K, NS32, VAX, PA-RISC, even Itanium were crushed under the unrelenting focus by third parties on building tools, software, and systems around x86 and later AMD64 architecture chips.

What is fascinating is that Intel got into that position by being open, there were no fewer than 12 licensees for its 8086 design, and people had supplanted "expensive, proprietary lock-in" type architectures with more open and cheaper chips. It was the emergence of the PC market, and the great Chip Recession of 1984, where Intel decided if it was going to stay a chip maker, it had to be the best source of its dominant computer chips. I was at Intel at the time and it shifted from partnering, to competing, with the same people who had licensed its chips, with the intent of "reclaiming" the market for CPU chips for itself.

You have to realize that at the time the bottom had fallen out of the market, and things like EPROMs and DRAM (both of which Intel made) were being sold on the grey market at below market costs as stocks from bankrupt computer companies made it into the wild. Further competitors like Ok Semiconductor were making better versions of the same chips (lower power, faster clock rates). Intel still had a manufacturing advantage but it could not survive if it couldn't make the margins on its chips hold. It dumped all of its unproductive lines, wrapped patents and licenses around all of its core chips, and then embarked on a long term strategy to kill anyone who wouldn't buy their chips from Intel at the prices that Intel demanded.

We can see they were remarkably successful at that, and a series of CEOs have presided over a manufacturing powerhouse that was funded by an unassailable capture of not only software developers but system OEMs as well. They fended off a number of anti-trust lawsuits, and delicately wove their way between former partners like Compaq who were now laying on the ground, mortally wounded.

ARM was playing in the embedded space, dominated by the 8051 (an Intel chip) where Intel played the licensing card (just like ARM) licensing its architecture to others who would make their own versions of the chips. As a licensing play they insured their partners would never move "up market" into the desktop space and threaten the cash cow that was x86.

The relentless pace of putting more transistors into less space drove an interesting problem for ARM. When you get a process shrink you can do one of two things, you can cut your costs (more die per wafer), or you can keep your costs about the same and increase features (more transistors per die). And the truth is you always did a bit of both. But the challenge with chips is their macro scale parts (the pin pads for example) really couldn't shrink. So you became "pad limited". The ratio of the area dedicated to the pads (which you connected external wires too) and the transistors could not drop below the point where most of your wafer was "pad". If it did so then you're costs flipped and your expensive manufacturing process was producing wafers of mostly pads so not utilizing its capabilities. At the Microprocessor Forum in 2001 the keynote suggested that spending anything more than 10% of your silicon budget on pads was too much. 90+% of your die had to be functional logic or the shrink just didn't make sense.

The effect of that was that chips ARM designed really had to do more stuff or they were not going to be cost effective on any silicon process with small feature sizes. And the simplest choice is to add more "big processor" features or additional peripherals.

So we had an explosion of "system on chip" products with all sorts of peripherals that continues to this day. And the process feature size keeps getting smaller, and the stuff added keeps growing. The ARM core was so small it could accommodate more peripherals on the same die, that made it cost effective and that made it a good choice for phones which needed long battery life but low cost. The age of phones put everything except the radios on chips (radios being like modems, different for every country, were not cost effective to add to the chip until software defined radio (SDR) became a thing. And the success as a phone platform pushed the need for tools, and the need for tools got more of the computer ecosystem focussed on building things for the ARM instruction set.

At that point step two became inevitable. Phones got better and better and more computer like, they need more and more of the things that "desktop" type computers need. You have a supplier (ARM) which is not trying to protect an entrenched business basically doing all it can to widen its markets. And a company like Apple, who wasn't trying to protect its desktop/laptop market share pushing the architecture as far as it can. More tools, more focus, more investment from others to support it, and like a fire that starts as a glowing ember near a convenient source of tinder, the blaze grows until the effects of the fire are creating its own wind and allowing it to grow bigger and stronger. Even after Intel woke up to the fact that the forest around their x86 architecture was on fire, I don't think they had enough time to put it out.

So here we are with ARM chips which are comparable in software support and feature set of Intel's low end desktop CPUs. But without the Intel "tax" which is the extra margin Intel could demand being the only player, and immune to Intel's ability to attack by patents or license shenanigans. Intel is in full on defense, paying tablet vendors like Lenovo to use their chips in ARM tablets, supporting the cost of building out their own IoT infrastructure with Galileo, and doing all they can to keep ARM out of their castle, the data center. Like DEC and its VAX line, or Sun and its SPARC line, they are doomed.

Looking at the performance of the iPad pro it is pretty clear you can build a chromebook or a laptop that would meet the needs of the mass market with an ARM architecture machine. And because ARM licensees can add features anywhere in the architecture including places like the frontside bus[1] which is tightly controlled space in x86 land, you will be able to provide features faster than x86 OEMs can convince Intel they need them. And that will change things in a pretty profound (and I think positive) way. Not the least of which might be having the opportunity to buy a lap top that isn't pre-backdoored by the chip manufacturer with its SMM.

[1] Literally if you buy a bus analyzer (a sophisticated logic analyzer) from Agilent or Tektronix and hook it to the Intel frontside bus, it won't display the signals until you enter the NDA # you got from Intel! That is pretty tightly controlled.

Steve Furber on the creation of ARM, quite interesting.

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.