Stardate 20010906.1732 (On Screen): Well, for Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) this is what you call your "gift from the Gods" -- as if ARM needed the help at this point. What with the ARM becoming the standard chip for the cell phone industry (representing a couple hundred million CPUs per year right there) and with Palm announcing that they would port their software from the obsolescent Motorola DragonBall to the ARM, things were looking mighty rosy. And it didn't hurt that Microsoft's WinCE ran on ARM in addition to MIPS and Toshiba's SH3. But the next version of WinCE for what Microsoft calls "PocketPC 2002" will
only run on ARM; SH3 and MIPS are now out in the cold.
People sometimes ask how any company can topple a seemingly insurmountable industry leader, like say Intel. Much celebration has been made in recent years (and rightfully so) about how AMD has come out of no-where and challenged Intel frontally. Little is made of the fact that ARM has stealthfully managed to sneak in from below. Right now there are more than ten times as many ARMs made each year than Intel's entire output of x86's -- and ARM doesn't even own a fab. It just licenses its designs to others for use in their devices. Even Intel is an ARM licensee, and one of the major producers of ARMs. Who says the Brits can't do high tech? (discuss)
