Introducing the ARM
The ARM processor family has been a remarkable success story, not least because so many other microprocessors became popular for a few years and then declined into obscurity (e.g., 6502, Cyrix 486, and Itanium). At the time of its release, the Motorola 68K was widely thought of as far more elegant and powerful than Intel’s 8086. Indeed, the 68K was a true 32-bit machine at a time when the 8086 was a 16-bit machine. The 68K was adopted by Apple’s Mac, the Atari, and Amiga computers – all major players in the home computer market. How could Intel’s humble 8086 possibly ever have competed? Well, IBM selected the 8086 family for its new personal computer and the rest is history. Motorola later dropped out of the semiconductor business.
In the late 1980s, a new company, Advanced RISC Machines, was founded to create high-performance microprocessors. The architecture of their machines followed the register-to-register paradigm of the RISC...
