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So here's today's quiz: what company is responsible for the best selling 32-bit microprocessor in the world? You may find the answer surprising: it's Advanced RISC Machines, otherwise known as ARM. Its chips are also known as ARMs and until just recently its CPUs were sold mainly to the invisible embedded market. ARM is fabless and though it does sell chips, most of its business is in licensing. Its stable of designers comes up with very small yet quite powerful processors which aren't super fast, and then those designs are licensed to other companies who incorporate them into their own ASICs. The company I used to work for, Qualcomm, was an ARM licensee, and incorporates an ARM into the cellphone handset chips it makes. Qualcomm alone sells more than 50 million ARMs per year now (which is greater than Intel's total Pentium volume) and Qualcomm is just one of ARM's many licensees. ARM has finally emerged onto the radar screen for most people because its CPUs are becoming the choice for PDAs, but it has dominated the 32-bit CPU market for years. Far more ARM CPUs are made and sold each year than Pentiums and Athlons and Celerons and Durons and PPC's combined. So it is exceedingly interesting to hear that ARM too has a 64-bit design, the ARM 10, and that one of its licensees has managed to get it up to 800 MHz. That makes it completely competitive against the Itanium, and ARM gives away nothing to any other company on CPU design expertise. I wonder whether anyone will be thinking about using these in servers? It seems likely. Don't write ARM off; Intel and Sun and IBM certainly won't. (discuss) Update 20010728: Here is some coverage of ARM. |
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