They seem Armless

Back in the 1980s CISC seemed fine, but a plucky UK company called Acorn Computers Ltd wanted a processor to take on the IBM PC, Amiga, Atari ST, and Apples of the world. Its hard work in 1985 produced the ARM1, and to try and put its achievement into scale, Acorn Computers produced a fully functioning 32-bit CPU with just 25,000 transistors running at 8MHz. The original Intel 8086 has 29,000 and was an eight-bit CISC processor – contrast that to the Intel 286, which itself had 134,000 transistors and ran with a similar performance to the ARM2.

Even so, ARM could have disappeared along with Acorn Computers. However, a small US manufacturer called Apple decided it needed a low-power processor for a new PDA called the Apple Newton, and ARM Holdings was created in 1990 with investment from VLSI Technologies. The ARM architecture needed additional work, such as an integrated memory management unit and full 32-bit address space support.

This culminated in the release of the ARM6 running the ARMv3 architecture in 1992, which is effectively what’s largely used today, only with an increased transistor count up to 36,000. That’s for the basic core – tacking on the MMU and 4KB cache increases this count to around 360,000. The ARM610 was at the heart of the Apple Newton released in 1993 and also licensed by DEC to make the Strong ARM. While the Apple Newton might have died off, its investment in ARM didn’t.

By 1998 ARM partners were shipping 50 million ARM-powered devices. In 2001 ARM had 76-percent of the 32-bit embedded RISC market and had 25 companies licensing its technology. By 2002 ARM partners had shipped more than 1 billion cores. By the end of 2019 ARM had shipped over 160 billion cores in total and 6.4 billion in the 4th quarter of 2019.