ARM Architecture Family

ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured for various environments. Arm Ltd. develops the architectures and licenses them to other companies, who design their own products that implement one or more of those architectures, including system on a chip (SoC) and system on module (SOM) designs, that incorporate different components such as memory, interfaces, and radios. It also designs cores that implement these instruction set architectures and licenses these designs to many companies that incorporate those core designs into their own products.

There have been several generations of the ARM design. The original ARM1 used a 32-bit internal structure but had a 26-bit address space that limited it to 64 MB of main memory. This limitation was removed in the ARMv3 series, which has a 32-bit address space, and several additional generations up to ARMv7 remained 32-bit. Released in 2011, the ARMv8-A architecture added support for a 64-bit address space and 64-bit arithmetic with its new 32-bit fixed-length instruction set. Arm Ltd. has also released a series of additional instruction sets for different rules; the "Thumb" extension adds both 32- and 16-bit instructions for improved code density, while Jazelle added instructions for directly handling Java bytecode. More recent changes include the addition of simultaneous multithreading (SMT) for improved performance or fault tolerance.

Due to their low costs, minimal power consumption, and lower heat generation than their competitors, ARM processors are desirable for light, portable, battery-powered devices, including smartphones, laptops and tablet computers, and other embedded systems."Some facts about the Acorn RISC Machine"
Roger Wilson posting to comp.arch, 2 November 1988. Retrieved 25 May 2007. However, ARM processors are also used for desktops and servers, including the world's fastest supercomputer ( Fugaku) from 2020 to 2022. With over 230 billion ARM chips produced, , ARM is the most widely used family of instruction set architectures (ISA) and the ISAs produced in the largest quantity. Currently, the widely used Cortex cores, older "classic" cores, and specialised SecurCore cores variants are available for each of these to include or exclude optional capabilities.

History

BBC Micro

Acorn Computers' first widely successful design was the BBC Micro, introduced in December 1981. This was a relatively conventional machine based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU but ran at roughly double the performance of competing designs like the Apple II due to its use of faster dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). Typical DRAM of the era ran at about 2 MHz; Acorn arranged a deal with Hitachi for a supply of faster 4 MHz parts.

Machines of the era generally shared memory between the processor and the framebuffer, which allowed the processor to quickly update the contents of the screen without having to perform separate input/output (I/O). As the timing of the video display is exacting, the video hardware had to have priority access to that memory. Due to a quirk of the 6502's design, the CPU left the memory untouched for half of the time. Thus by running the CPU at 1 MHz, the video system could read data during those down times, taking up the total 2 MHz bandwidth of the RAM. In the BBC Micro, the use of 4 MHz RAM allowed the same technique to be used, but running at twice the speed. This allowed it to outperform any similar machine on the market.

Acorn Business Computer

1981 was also the year that the IBM Personal Computer was introduced. Using the recently introduced Intel 8088, a 16-bit CPU compared to the 6502's 8-bit design, it offered higher overall performance. Its introduction changed the desktop computer market radically: what had been largely a hobby and gaming market emerging over the prior five years began to change to a must-have business tool where the earlier 8-bit designs simply could not compete. Even newer 32-bit designs were also coming to market, such as the Motorola 68000 and National Semiconductor NS32016.

Acorn began considering how to compete in this market and produced a new paper design named the Acorn Business Computer. They set themselves the goal of producing a machine with ten times the performance of the BBC Micro, but at the same price. This would outperform and underprice the PC. At the same time, the recent introduction of the Apple Lisa brought the graphical user interface (GUI) concept to a wider audience and suggested the future belonged to machines with a GUI. The Lisa, however, cost $9,995, as it was packed with support chips, large amounts of memory, and a hard disk drive, all very expensive then.

The engineers then began studying all of the CPU designs available. Their conclusion about the existing 16-bit designs was that they were a lot more expensive and were still "a bit crap", offering only slightly higher performance than their BBC Micro design. They also almost always demanded a large number of support chips to operate even at that level, which drove up the cost of the computer as a whole. These systems would simply not hit the design goal. They also considered the new 32-bit designs, but these cost even more and had the same issues with support chips. According to Sophie Wilson, all the processors tested at that time performed about the same, with about a 4 Mbit/second bandwidth.

Two key events led Acorn down the path to ARM. One was the publication of a series of reports from the University of California, Berkeley, which suggested that a simple chip design could nevertheless have extremely high performance, much higher than the latest 32-bit designs on the market. The second was a visit by Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson to the Western Design Center, a company run by Bill Mensch and his sister, which had become the logical successor to the MOS team and was offering new versions like the WDC 65C02. The Acorn team saw high school students producing chip layouts on Apple II machines, which suggested that anyone could do it. In contrast, a visit to another design firm working on modern 32-bit CPU revealed a team with over a dozen members which were already on revision H of their design and yet it still contained bugs. This cemented their late 1983 decision to begin their own CPU design, the Acorn RISC Machine.

Design concepts

The original Berkeley RISC designs were in some sense teaching systems, not designed specifically for outright performance. To the RISC's basic register-heavy and load/store concepts, ARM added a number of the well-received design notes of the 6502. Primary among them was the ability to quickly serve interrupts, which allowed the machines to offer reasonable input/output performance with no added external hardware. To offer interrupts with similar performance as the 6502, the ARM design limited its physical address space to 64 MB of total addressable space, requiring 26 bits of address. As instructions were 4 bytes (32 bits) long, and required to be aligned on 4-byte boundaries, the lower 2 bits of an instruction address were always zero. This meant the program counter (PC) only needed to be 24 bits, allowing it to be stored along with the eight bit processor flags in a single 32-bit register. That meant that upon receiving an interrupt, the entire machine state could be saved in a single operation, whereas had the PC been a full 32-bit value, it would require separate operations to store the PC and the status flags. This decision halved the interrupt overhead.

Another change, and among the most important in terms of practical real-world performance, was the modification of the instruction set to take advantage of page mode DRAM. Recently introduced, page mode allowed subsequent accesses of memory to run twice as fast if they were roughly in the same location, or "page", in the DRAM chip. Berkeley's design did not consider page mode and treated all memory equally. The ARM design added special vector-like memory access instructions, the "S-cycles", that could be used to fill or save multiple registers in a single page using page mode. This doubled memory performance when they could be used, and was especially important for graphics performance.

The Berkeley RISC designs used register windows to reduce the number of register saves and restores performed in procedure calls; the ARM design did not adopt this.

Wilson developed the instruction set, writing a simulation of the processor in BBC BASIC that ran on a BBC Micro with a second 6502 processor. This convinced Acorn engineers they were on the right track. Wilson approached Acorn's CEO, Hermann Hauser, and requested more resources. Hauser gave his approval and assembled a small team to design the actual processor based on Wilson's ISA. The official Acorn RISC Machine project started in October 1983.

ARM1

Acorn chose VLSI Technology as the "silicon partner", as they were a source of ROMs and custom chips for Acorn. Acorn provided the design and VLSI provided the layout and production. The first samples of ARM silicon worked properly when first received and tested on 26 April 1985. Known as ARM1, these versions ran at 6 MHz.

The first ARM application was as a second processor for the BBC Micro, where it helped in developing simulation software to finish development of the support chips (VIDC, IOC, MEMC), and sped up the CAD software used in ARM2 development. Wilson subsequently rewrote BBC BASIC in ARM assembly language. The in-depth knowledge gained from designing the instruction set enabled the code to be very dense, making ARM BBC BASIC an extremely good test for any ARM emulator.

ARM2

The result of the simulations on the ARM1 boards led to the late 1986 introduction of the ARM2 design running at 8 MHz, and the early 1987 speed-bumped version at 10 to 12 MHz. A significant change in the underlying architecture was the addition of a Booth multiplier, whereas formerly multiplication had to be carried out in software. Further, a new Fast Interrupt reQuest mode, FIQ for short, allowed registers 8 through 14 to be replaced as part of the interrupt itself. This meant FIQ requests did not have to save out their registers, further speeding interrupts.

The ARM2 was roughly seven times the performance of a typical 7 MHz 68000-based system like the Commodore Amiga or Macintosh SE. It was twice as fast as an Intel 80386

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