ARMed and ready!

We are right in the midst of an on-going battle which I am sure most haven't noticed.  You may have heard about the Intel vs AMD wars in 90's, but have you heard about ARM processors? This is the processor of choice for all our embedded devices and probably for your phone as well and probably has a larger impact in the tech industry as a whole.   Why choose arm?  It can be best answered by learning more about the chip.

From wikipedia:

"The ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by ARM Limited. It was known as the Advanced RISC Machine, and before that as the Acorn RISC Machine. The ARM architecture is the most widely used 32-bit ISA in terms of numbers produced. They were originally conceived as a processor for desktop personal computers by Acorn Computers, a market now dominated by the x86 family used byIBM PC compatible computers. But the relative simplicity of ARM processors made them suitable for low power applications. This has made them dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market as relatively low cost and small microprocessors and microcontrollers."

Surprisingly, when someone asks who the giants of the semiconductor industry are, the names of Intel's founders, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, float to the top of my mind. And of course, there is the colorful and controversial William Shockly, who founded Shockly Semiconductor Labs, the first major semiconductor lab in Silicon Valley. And then there is Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, who along with Robert Noyce is credited with inventing the integrated circuit.  The person behind ARM is Dr. Robin Saxby; or to be more specific, Sir Robin Saxby, the founder of Advanced RISC Machines LTD (ARM) of Cambridge, England.

How big is the ARM market?

"As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than a billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM processor. As of 2009, ARM processors account for approximately 90% of all embedded 32-bit RISC processors. ARM processors are used extensively in consumer electronics, including PDAs, mobile phones, iPods and other digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers."

"Consider: Intel sold its 1 billionth x86 chip in 2003. Its closest rival, AMD, broke the 500 million mark just this year. ARM, on the other hand, expects to ship 2.8 billion processors in 2009 alone -- or around 90 chips per second. That's in addition to the more than 10 billion ARM processors already powering devices today.

Pick up any mobile phone and there's a 95 percent chance it contains at least one ARM processor. If the phone was manufactured in the past five years, make that 100 percent; that goes for standard handsets as well as smartphones.

The same is true for portable media players. Whether the label says Archos, iRiver, or Sony, inside it's ARM."

Thus, ARM is a giant in the tech arena and most surprising is that folks in the U.S. haven't heard of  the almost ubiquitous ARM processor. Almost ubiquitous because the ARM processor in some form or another is at the core of almost every cell or smartphone sold today, as well as being used in billions of embedded devices around the world.  Until now these processors have mostly had life in embedded devices, cell phones and most recently in smartphones. They are the main processors used in many of the Linux-based operating systems on the market today, which you'll find in cell and smartphones, such as Apple'siPhone, and in DVD players, GPS systems, smart TVs, set-top boxes, etc.

However, we are starting to see ARM processors move into some netbook models.The one with the highest profile has been the ARM-based Qualcomm SnapDragon processor that will reportedly be used in an HP netbook somewhere down the line. And the ARM processor is also at the heart of Nvidia's Tegra processor that, like the SnapDragon, is heavily targeted at netbooks, and especially netbooks aimed at being sold through telecom providers like Verizon Wireless, AT&T, etc. They are even showing up in servers with low-voltage requirements.ARM Holdings, LTD, which is the parent company, does a lot of R&D of its own, but its real business is that of IP licensing. The ARM core is licensed to six public ARM silicon partners that are specifically taking aim at netbooks and smartbooks. These partners are Marvel, Qualcomm, Freescale, Samsung, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments.In emerging markets, Linux-based systems could do well. And over time, Linux-based systems based on an OS like Android could actually gain ground with carriers that want to sell subsidized netbooks in stores, and want an OS that offers more control of the users' experience and service offerings.

This is why, we chose to use ARM in our embedded devices.  Lock and load!

References:

www.wikipedia.org
www.pcmag.com
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140039/ARM_vs._Atom_The_battle_for_the_next_digital_frontier?taxonomyId=15