How Acorn Computers Became Arm | Matt Godbolt
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 15 เม.ย. 2024
- Matt Godbolt tells the story of how Acorn Computers, makers of the BBC Micro, decided to design their own chip and how they eventually evolved into the company we know today as Arm.
Clip is from Episode 5 of the Microarch Club Podcast: microarch.club/episodes/101/
Microarch Club: microarch.club/
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I'm no programmer but I had aspirations. I dabbled with a couple of languages before learning C and found that something about it 'clicked'. For me it's a neat place between the low level, where you might be working with registers and addresses and the later more object oriented languages, where it's objects, methods and properties and you can be more removed from the machine. Now and again I need to do a little bit of coding, say in JavaScript, VB, C++ or Python and I find that many of the fundamentals that I picked up from using C have helped me to work out just enough to do what I need.
One funny anecdote about the ARM processor. It was consuming very little power from the start, even though it was designed for a desktop computer. This was for economical reasons: if you didn't want to have a ceramic casing which cost several dollars per CPU, you could use a plastic casing which cost pennies per CPU but required the processor to consume at the most 1 Watt. The simple RISC design made it feasible. The first ARM chip consumed 0.1 Watt and successfully passed a test without even being powered (one of the designers of the processors has an interview on TH-cam where he mentioned this)
It can’t possible be 0,1 watts that’s 20mA at 5V any CPU draws more. It’s probably around 5 WATTS 1A max, that sounds more valid.
@@CallousCoder I'm not an electronics expert, but my source is the video "ARM Processor - Sowing the Seeds of Success - Computerphile" on TH-cam (around 10:00) from one of the designers of the ARM processor.
P.S: if you believe I misunderstood the video or if you think the guy interviewed doesn't remember things properly please let me know. I'm genuinely interested in knowing if one of my source videos of IT history contains misleading information.
@@ecdhe oh I’ll have a look. Because it seems very unlikely small at 0.1WATTS, I also tried to find the specs online but couldn’t find them.
Btw have you watch Micro Men? It’s a great movie about the guys from what became ARM vs Clive Sinclair in the race to land the bid from the BBC to have the UK classroom micro order.
@@ecdhe well he’s definitely saying it, he’s even saying that they could power it solely from the signal inputs, so it has to be well below a watt. That’s insane!
Even for a mere 25.000 transistors that’s incredible!