A historical past of ARM, half 3: Coming full circle

It began, as did many issues within the ARM story, with Apple.

Steve Jobs had returned, triumphantly, to the corporate he had co-founded. The discharge of the colourful gumdrop iMacs in 1998, an settlement with Microsoft, and the sale of Apple’s ARM inventory had introduced the corporate from near-bankruptcy to a stable monetary footing. However Apple’s “iCEO” was nonetheless looking for the subsequent massive factor.

Jobs had geared up the iMacs with a brand new connector known as FireWire, which enabled quick transfers of video and sound. A file format known as MP3 was turning into in style for pc customers to share music on their computer systems, and corporations had already began making transportable MP3 gamers. However these gadgets had tiny quantities of storage, sluggish USB 1.0 switch speeds, and horrible software program. Jobs grew to become obsessive about the concept of creating a participant and devoted nearly all of his time to the undertaking.

Apple partnered with an organization known as PortalPlayer, which had been working by itself participant. The {hardware} used a customized ARM chip, the PP5502. It was a system on a chip with twin ARM7 cores working at 90 MHz with 32MB of onboard reminiscence. The one different giant chip on the motherboard was a FireWire controller. The pliability of ARM licensing made it straightforward to design a CPU that had customized circuitry for issues like MP3 decoding.

How straightforward? An acquaintance, Dr. John Sims, informed me the story of one other MP3 participant firm from across the similar time. It took a single engineer simply six months so as to add a Digital Sign Processor (DSP) to the usual ARM design. A rival agency that was constructing chips from scratch fairly than partnering with ARM had 60 engineers, and the undertaking took 3 times as lengthy.

The iPod shipped in 2001, and after a Home windows-compatible model was launched, the little music participant grew to become the business commonplace. On the system’s peak, over 50 million iPods had been bought annually. Whereas individuals had been enamored with its interface, ease of use, and iconic white headphones, most failed to understand that the iPod was really a tiny pc. It had a CPU, reminiscence, a miniature exhausting drive, and an working system, and its contact wheel and buttons had been like just a little mouse and keyboard. It even had a bitmap show that might play easy video games.

Talking of video games, ARM’s second massive win in 2001 got here within the type of Nintendo’s Sport Boy Advance. The successor to the unique Sport Boy, it shipped with a 16.8 MHz ARM7 core with embedded reminiscence. It additionally had a Sharp LR35902 for compatibility with the outdated system. Even transportable sport consoles had been making the bounce from CISC to RISC chips.