[sohcahtoa]

> ARM were hardly the first people to bring a RISC CPU to market: MIPS, SPARC, and POWER are RISC architectures which pre-dated ARM.

Minor point: ARM-1-based devices were kinda, sorta, brought to market around '85-'86. That's neck-and-neck with MIPS I. Real ARM-2 based machines in '87 were three years ahead of the RS/6000.

Of course, lots of people were developing RISC architectures in the early 80s, in parallel.

[tacos]

Even Intel, of course. Windows NT started development exclusively on RISC: the Intel i860 ("N-Ten"). Shipped supporting MIPS, DEC Alpha and PowerPC.

[prodmerc]

Not to mention Intel had quite a successful line of ARM CPUs back in the day - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale

Which makes articles like this one: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-arm-processors-... ridiculous.

"the unthinkable happened. Intel revealed it was going to build ARM processors."

Do your damn research, people :-)

[daemin]

Well from memory Intel sold off the general purpose ARM CPU division to Marvell back in 2006 or so. Though it kept the ARM chips that were specialised for storage or networking IIRC. So technically Intel has always made ARM chips in one form or another, just not any that slot into a mobile phone.

[prodmerc]

I really wanna know the logic behind that decision. They probably thought ARM was not worth it? Despite it being used successfully in Pocket PCs?

[daemin]

Based on what another commented has said it seems Intel bought the ARM license from DEC, and given that they sold off only the consumer ARM chips - keeping the task specific ones - it makes sense in a way. It was so they wouldn't have any internal competition or divided focus away from their low power x86 chips - the Atom's.

[fit2rule]

It was neck and neck, in my opinion. In the UK, ARM ruled, but in the US, the MIPS Magnum series were well received and widely used. MIPS had a chance to be an ARM, but it was squandered.

[simula67]

> MIPS had a chance to be an ARM, but it was squandered.

I have always wondered how ARM succeeded when MIPS was already around. Anyone know ?

[digi_owl]

Just guessing, but it could have something to do with ARM not doing actual hardware. Instead they license either chip designs or the ISA to anyone willing to pay.

In a way it is reminiscent of the z80 clones that was all over the place in the 80s.

[thesz]

Early ARM designs have group load/store commands. This goes against RISC philosophy. You cannot call ARM a RISC because of that. It is a CISC with simplified decoder.

[pjc50]

This is the worst single piece of pedantry that I've ever seen on HN.

[thesz]

I designed chips for living, despite being software engineer. Including, and not limited to, CPUs. In the design process I had to account for optimizing compilers and possible high-performance and low-energy versions.

So I am very sensitive to the misuse of "RISC trade mark".

Ideal RISC design is very easy to develop. It can be easily tailored to various application domains, including high-performance (OoO) and low-energy. RISC instruction semantics should be simple, all implementation details are hidden. In my opinion, there are only three RISC designs - DEC Alpha, IBM Power and RISC-V. Others contain various design issues that show their inner cogs and that had to be accounted in the designs different from the original one.

(in my MIPS implementation experience I've implemented 33% of MIPS commands in the first month and spent another month accounting for branch delay slot)

ARM contains three deviations from ideal RISC: user-visible PC (read of PC returns PC of command+8!), multi-cycle group load/store commands and condition codes. All three "features" make it difficult to design something different in performance than original ARM.

[dave2000]

It's amazing what some people find important, isn't it.

Is that pedentry better than the "android isn't really open source because Google doesn't do pull requests" though?