Taming the Tech Titans: ARMing the Future
How a small group of enthusiasts took on the Titans of the tech industry, and made computing accessible for all
This article is part two in a series. Read part one here.
In a converted barn in a Cambridgeshire village, a small team was plotting the next digital revolution — one that would lead to three-quarters of the world’s population owning a mobile phone with personal computing power greater than NASA used to put men on the moon. They would create the world we live in today, a radically different world from any other in human history.
Microprocessors brought computers out of the corporate vault and onto the desktop. But, they were still complex, expensive, and (crucially) power hungry technology. Taking computer power from the desktop to the pocket would require a big directional shift — and a new way of doing business.
Today’s ‘digital revolution’ myth is usually told as a Silicon Valley story (by Silicon Valley at least). But the reality is more complex and more global.
From Acorns
Acorn Computer started as a small company in Cambridge, England that produced hobby computers for enthusiasts. Back in 1981 it was plucked from its relative obscurity by the BBC, who were looking to create a ‘BBC Microcomputer’ to go alongside a new series of TV programmes about the new phenomenon of ‘personal computing’. The broadcaster had decided that simply publishing information about these devices was not enough — people needed a hands-on, interactive experience. The BBC wanted the world to be exposed to a low cost, easy to use computer that could educate and inform, while also providing a platform for entertainment.
A competition was launched to develop, manufacture, and sell a BBC-branded personal computer. That decision started a chain of events that would lead to a new approach to microprocessor design — to the low cost, low power technology without which the iPhone and the smart, connected devices we have today could not exist.
Acorn won that contest and began to develop, manufacture, and sell the BBC Microcomputer, a product that would make them a household name. Acorn was the first UK example of what has since become very familiar: a high-tech, high-growth, high-profile ‘Startup.’
To Hack is Human
At this point in PC evolution, the UK and US markets differed. Acorn’s computer design didn’t restrict users from getting into the guts of their machine, and many tech hobbyists took to connecting and experimenting (‘hacking’) with any number of peripheral devices, using and creating their own code. But the US computer industry followed a more ‘packaged’ route. Suppliers were creating computers and software that were well-designed and easy to use — and as far as the guts were concerned, hermetically sealed.
Not surprisingly, the US computing industry focused on the most immediate need: computers for business. Word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation tools became slick and efficient, and users never needed to see the hardware and code that made these tools work.
Back in Cambridge, however, the income from the BBC Microcomputer had propelled Acorn, virtually overnight, from almost nothing to a valuation of over £100 million. That wealth gave Acorn the space to experiment. Their market was different from the American mainstream. In the UK, schools and individuals wanted to tinker with their machines, and these customers simply could not afford the price points of a machine that was designed for business use.
The Genesis of ARM
From early on, Acorn had outsourced the actual manufacturing of its computers. In an approach that has been followed by numerous startups since, Acorn did not have to set up or finance a factory. Instead, it focused on creating computer designs, subcontracting their manufacture to other companies.
If that could be done for the computer as a whole, why not for its beating, silicon heart: the microprocessor itself? Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson, the two Acorn engineers who created the original prototype of the BBC Microcomputer, decided it could. A visit to the US showed them that even in large companies the microprocessor design was being done by small teams — sometimes just one person.
So in 1983, Steve and Sophie began the design of what would become the Acorn Risc Machine. Rebranded as Advanced RISC Machines, it is now better known as ARM. Their design is now — by a long, long way — the most-used microprocessor architecture in the world. Several billion chips later, almost everyone in the developed world is carrying at least one, if not several ARM-based processor chips around with them every day, buried in their mobile phones and electronic devices.
Taking the RISC
The secret of ARM’s success is its simplicity, which has spurred the creation of low-cost, low-power devices around the world. In the early days of personal computing, processor designs were dominated by CISC: Complex Instruction Set Computing. CISC processors are powerful, but they’re large; several thousand transistors over a large silicon area, with the increased cost and power consumption that comes with it. US manufacturers had no incentive to create simpler, smaller chips — but Acorn did.
Reduced Instruction Set Computing, in particular the version adopted by ARM, makes for simpler, smaller, and less-costly chips without (as it turns out) a corresponding impact on performance. RISC-based processor designs became central to the next generation of Acorn computers, and opened the door to an emerging market of portable, digital devices such as mobile phones.
When ARM was spun out of Acorn in 1990, it did not intend to target the mobile market. But battery-powered mobile devices needed low cost and — especially — low power processors. Soon the siren call of mobile would come to dominate ARM’s business development. Today, the vast majority of mobiles, smartphones and tablets feature ARM-based processors.
A Licence to Do Business — At ‘Digital’ Scale
One more innovation helped to power ARM’s rocket-like acceleration: its business model.
Since ARM produces chip designs and not actual physical chips, it is free to licence those designs to any company designing and manufacturing chips themselves. More than a thousand organisations — the likes of Apple, Samsung, Texas Instrument, Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcomm — use ARM designs in their own chips, adding their own logic to the processor core to optimise for specific applications. Some even license the ARM instruction set, the crown jewels of ARM’s intellectual property, and create their own designs that are based on it.
That makes ARM a fundamentally different business from a traditional chip manufacturer. Although the company designs hardware, it is fundamentally a software business, and can therefore benefit from digital scale. Its interesting customer set — the chip makers not the chip consumers — also incentivises ARM to continually make their processors more valuable, less complex, and less expensive. For ARM, volume is more important than unit price.
There are now more ARM processors than there are people in the world — more than 90 billion have been shipped and the number is growing. Very likely, more than half the population of the world regularly carries an ARM processor; almost every mobile phone includes at least one ARM-based chip, and three-quarters of the world’s population now have a mobile. Chips of all kinds now include an internal microprocessor together with additional specialist logic, and ARM is the favourite of companies around the world. The latest iPhones are reputed to contain at least 8 ARM processor cores, in chips from many different manufacturers, including Apple itself. All of the processors in Apple’s iOS products are ARM-based.
Digital: the Next Generation
Today the ARM ecosystem is fostering a new generation of experimenters and ‘makers’ — this time exploring what can be done with the $10, credit-card sized and ARM-based Raspberry Pi. Now, though, it is a generation that is worldwide and Internet-connected. The BBC Micro-computer outstripped its anticipated demand of a few thousand units to sell, eventually, 1.5 million. But Raspberry Pi has massively outdone this: anticipated to sell 10,000, it has since shipped over 12 million, making it the third-best-selling general purpose computer in the world.
Now ARM, selling only software and therefore taking only a small royalty on the chips that use its designs, is ideally positioned as the ‘go to’ source of processing power for the Internet of Things. Together with its partners it is investing heavily in the end-to-end security that is needed to make this growing industry safe, and has become the de facto standard for low cost processing power in an industry that, even in the guts of servers and supercomputers, now uses networked computer power based on large arrays of small processors rather than designs utilising single, large, complex ones. A worldwide ecosystem of companies that depend on the ARM design has emerged, driving the company’s growth as a global supplier.
Who will be the ‘ARM’ of data?
When he created the iPhone, Steve Jobs brought not just a phone, but low cost, pocket-sized, connected computing power to the world. To do it, he had to take on (and overturn) an industry mindset of US commercial computing that was wedded to the desktop model of computing. And to large, complex, and expensive machines. Taking a new direction with the iPhone allowed him to create the world’s most valuable company, at the leading edge of what has become a $3 trillion global mobile industry.
But he couldn’t have done it without the work that was done in other parts of the world. To create low cost, battery-friendly computing power, and — another essential component — make mass market ‘digital wireless’ devices affordable to all. Technology is a continuing dance between the personal, the corporate, and the global. Governments and regulators occasionally play a part too, and today’s ‘Titans’ rarely have the upper hand for long (see part one).
This is history, but it raises a critical — multi-billion dollar — question for the future. Now that data is the new oil we see personal information and the growth of AI fuelling a new, massively-valuable stage of economic growth. So, who will become the ‘ARM’ of personal data — dislodging today’s ‘Titans’ from their perch, and setting, yet again, a new direction in digital development?
Geoff Vincent is a writer, consultant and practitioner of innovation. He is a member of the Big HAT Community and a HATTER, and he led the development of the first personal pocketphone. www.linkedin.com/in/geoff-vincent.
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