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The evolution of personal computing has been built on the arrival of disruptive technologies: the emergence of programming, the invention of the first personal computer and the World Wide Web. There are many examples, some more well-known than others, which is why today we are going to look at one belonging to this last category: ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) architecture, a processor architecture designed to be energy-efficient and compact.
Nowadays, it is absolutely everywhere in our mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, but also in many connected objects. If we had to thank anyone for the existence of ARM, it would certainly be Sophie Wilson, a computer scientist who anticipated the needs of the mobile era in the 1970s, long before it came into being.
Sophie Wilson had this brilliant intuition: mobility was going to become more and more important. © Chris Monk/Flickr
The woman who simplified computing
Born in 1957 in the industrial Yorkshire city of Leeds, she evolved in a family environment intellectually stimulating: she is the daughter of a physics teacher and a father who is a professor of English literature.
The first real milestone in her career is between IT and… agriculture. While studying on the prestigious Cambridge Mathematical Tripos (an undergraduate mathematics course at the University of Cambridge), Wilson tackled a real-world challenge: optimizing the automated feeding of a herd of cows.
She chose the 6502 microprocessor, a component manufactured by MOS Technology in 1975, which was highly innovative for its time: it was inexpensive and powerful, and rivaled even the largest incumbents such as Motorola and Intel. A candidate ideal for an experimental project and necessarily limiting development costs. Thanks to this, she developed an electronic control system, a precursor to today's precision breeding systems, allowing the automated management of cow feeding.
A student project, which may at first glance appear quite modest, but which was already based on the principles that would later characterize the ARM architecture: energy efficiency, functional simplicity and precise adaptation to real needs. Wilson already understood that the power of a system lay not only in the complexity of its components, but in the intelligence of their organization.
The ARM Architecture: A Conceptual Revolution
Wilson began working on the ARM architecture in October 1983, and his very conception of what a processor should be was completely different from the dominant approaches of the time. While traditional processors multiplied complex instructions (CISC – Complex Instruction Set Computing), Wilson opted for a radically different approach with RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing).
200% Deposit Bonus up to €3,000 180% First Deposit Bonus up to $20,000To better understand what this means, let's take an example to illustrate: First, let's imagine processors as cooks. Traditional processors, CISCs, are chefs who know a multitude of complex recipes, ranging from a simple fried egg to much more elaborate gourmet dishes. Thus, they can perform a wide variety of tasks, but at the cost of a certain slowness and complexity.
Wilson, with the ARM architecture, opted for a different approach: RISC. It's exactly as if she had trained specialized cooks in a few very effective basic techniques. The latter are much faster at preparing simple dishes, but they must combine these techniques to make more complex dishes.
RISC architecture is based on several fundamental principles. First, a simplified but highly optimized instruction set; if we take the example of the cook, he knows only a few basic recipes, but masters them to perfection.
Secondly, regular and predictable execution cycles: if we compare the processor to a clock this time, the execution cycles would correspond to the regular ticking. In the RISC architecture, each instruction takes about the same amount of time to execute. The needle moves steadily and measurably, each tic-tac representing a well-defined unit of time.
Next, efficient use of registers, which are the processor's short-term memory and are used to temporarily store data used by calculations. In a RISC architecture, many registers are used to avoid fetching data from memory, a too slow operation. If the processor can access a greater number of registers, it can necessarily work faster.
Last point: minimal power consumption. Its simple design and efficiency made it much less energy-intensive than its CISC contemporaries.
A minimalist approach that allows for solid performance while maintaining moderate power consumption. The first ARM processor, delivered on April 26, 1985, and worked perfectly right from the start.
A little less than 30 years later, in 2012, ARM processors equipped 95% of smartphones, a dominance that can be explained by their unique ability to maintain an optimal balance between performance, price and autonomy. In 1990, ARM Ltd. was founded (now in litigation against Qualcomm) to manage and develop this architecture. The latter was created by a team of engineers from Acorn Computers, who had also worked on the development of ARM with Wilson. This processor design is still relevant despite its age, but it faces increasing competition, particularly from RISC-V, an open-source architecture that is gaining more and more ground. Come to think of it, such an old concept that still exists today is a very rare phenomenon in the tech world; Wilson's intuition was therefore remarkably accurate.
- Sophie Wilson, a visionary engineer, designed a revolutionary processor architecture focusing on simplicity and efficiency.
- The ARM architecture, born in the 1980s, transformed mobile computing by balancing performance and low consumption.
- Today ubiquitous in our mobile devices, this innovation remains a benchmark despite the emergence of new alternatives.
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