>Dimiter_Popoff wrote:
>
>> On 05.6.2014 г. 02:08, rickman wrote:
>> > Many years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was the x86 and
>> > then there were the viable contenders.  That list was headed by MIPS
and
>> > PowerPC with others as "also ran".  With time none of these
>> > architectures kept up with the megalith Intel's forces and the x86
took
>> > over the world resulting in the extinction of the dinosaur.
>> >
>> > In more recent times the focus has shifted from raw power (so
essential
>> >   in the times of dinosaurs) to low power as dictated by the smaller
>> > size and battery operation of new devices (think mammals).  Now the
>> > power guzzling of the x86 line is creating global warming and
>> > threatening our very existence.  But today's processor on the white
>> > charger is the ARM, not PowerPC or MIPS.
>> >
>> > Was it inevitable that these lesser architectures take second fiddle
to
>> > the ARM or was it just a fluke of marketing or corporate
mismanagement
>> > that led to their being relegated to the processing hall of fame?
>> >
>> > Is there any compelling technical reason for the emergence of the ARM
>> > over other non-x86 processors?
>> >
>>
>> Power architecture is very much alive, just check what Freescale are
>> making.
>
>PowerPC in quite a few of the Freescale parts is designed to work
>in bad environments both electrical and physical.  (automotive
>engine controllers, and bad environment applications like process
>control.
>
>w..
>
>
>

I work with a lot of safety-critical embedded customers, and most of the
ones I have seen prefer PowerPC.

All that being said, never underestimate the value of a good tooling
infrastructure to the success of a chip. There are a lot tools out there
for ARM chips making it easy to experiment with.


	   
					
---------------------------------------		
Posted through http://www.EmbeddedRelated.com

On 7/1/2014 6:48 AM, Ulf Samuelsson wrote:
> 2014-06-05 01:08, rickman skrev:
>> Many years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was the x86 and
>> then there were the viable contenders.  That list was headed by MIPS and
>> PowerPC with others as "also ran".  With time none of these
>> architectures kept up with the megalith Intel's forces and the x86 took
>> over the world resulting in the extinction of the dinosaur.
>>
>> In more recent times the focus has shifted from raw power (so essential
>>   in the times of dinosaurs) to low power as dictated by the smaller
>> size and battery operation of new devices (think mammals).  Now the
>> power guzzling of the x86 line is creating global warming and
>> threatening our very existence.  But today's processor on the white
>> charger is the ARM, not PowerPC or MIPS.
>>
>> Was it inevitable that these lesser architectures take second fiddle to
>> the ARM or was it just a fluke of marketing or corporate mismanagement
>> that led to their being relegated to the processing hall of fame?
>>
>> Is there any compelling technical reason for the emergence of the ARM
>> over other non-x86 processors?
>>
>
> The ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) was initially design for the BBC
> Microcomputer TV Series.
> Once available they tried to sell it to the embedded world,
> with focus on laserprinters. This was a total failure.
>
> The critical moment was the design-in at Apple for the Newton PDA.
>
> The Newton was a total failure, but at its introduction, this was not
> known, and Semiconductor Companies had learned the need for binary
> compatability from the PC market, so many companies licensed the
> ARM core for use in ASICs, which they hoped then to sell to Apple.
>
> With the ARM core available, people started to design ASICs with the core.
>
> When I worked at National Semiconductor, Ericsson Mobile Phones started
> a study (IIRC around 1995) to replace the Z-80 they were using in the
> GSM phones, and the main contenders were the ARM-7, AVR and the CR-16.
>
> There were some criteria:
> * Low Power
> * 4 MB address space
> * Synthesizable HDL description of the core
> * IAR C compiler
> * ENEA OSE RTOS support.

So which of these features did the PowerPC or MIPS not have?  I guess 
PowerPC was not availble as HDL, but wasn't MIPS being used in ASICs 
already?


> It was good timing, because while the CR16 was real low power, it only
> had 128 kB address space, beeing a 16 bit machine.
> it was to be redesigned with a larger address space.
>
> While working in the National Research Labs, I ran a project to
> make a synthesizable core, and together with my Manager, we made sure
> that National focused on IAR compilers for all parts.
>
> ENEA could get an RTOS very quickly once needed.
> My only problem was that they designed the core with 2 MB address
> space,
> When the "official" project started, they requested working samples
> within 2 months.
> I still remember the expression on the VP of Microcontroller,
> when he found out from the manager of the Architecture group
> that they had been aware of the 4 MB address space requirement for 2
> years...
>
> The ARM architecture was judged as almost, but not completely useless
> for mobile phones, and Ericsson selected the AVR.

Any idea why the ARM was thought useless?  Was it too large and power 
hungry compared to the tiny AVR?


> ARM redesigned their core to include the Thumb instruction set.
> At the same time, at National Semiconductor's request, (based on my
> studies :-) they also designed a synthesizable ARM core.
> I do not think National ever used the core though.
>
> Most other mobile phone vendors were using ARM-7.
> Ericsson ran out of steam with the AVR around 2001 or so, and then
> went for the ARM-9 and later as many others the Cortex-A series.

I guess your window into the scene is limited to what could be seen from 
inside National Semi?

-- 

Rick

2014-06-05 01:08, rickman skrev:
> Many years ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was the x86 and
> then there were the viable contenders.  That list was headed by MIPS and
> PowerPC with others as "also ran".  With time none of these
> architectures kept up with the megalith Intel's forces and the x86 took
> over the world resulting in the extinction of the dinosaur.
>
> In more recent times the focus has shifted from raw power (so essential
>   in the times of dinosaurs) to low power as dictated by the smaller
> size and battery operation of new devices (think mammals).  Now the
> power guzzling of the x86 line is creating global warming and
> threatening our very existence.  But today's processor on the white
> charger is the ARM, not PowerPC or MIPS.
>
> Was it inevitable that these lesser architectures take second fiddle to
> the ARM or was it just a fluke of marketing or corporate mismanagement
> that led to their being relegated to the processing hall of fame?
>
> Is there any compelling technical reason for the emergence of the ARM
> over other non-x86 processors?
>

The ARM (Acorn RISC Machine) was initially design for the BBC 
Microcomputer TV Series.
Once available they tried to sell it to the embedded world,
with focus on laserprinters. This was a total failure.

The critical moment was the design-in at Apple for the Newton PDA.

The Newton was a total failure, but at its introduction, this was not 
known, and Semiconductor Companies had learned the need for binary 
compatability from the PC market, so many companies licensed the
ARM core for use in ASICs, which they hoped then to sell to Apple.

With the ARM core available, people started to design ASICs with the core.

When I worked at National Semiconductor, Ericsson Mobile Phones started
a study (IIRC around 1995) to replace the Z-80 they were using in the 
GSM phones, and the main contenders were the ARM-7, AVR and the CR-16.

There were some criteria:
* Low Power
* 4 MB address space
* Synthesizable HDL description of the core
* IAR C compiler
* ENEA OSE RTOS support.

It was good timing, because while the CR16 was real low power, it only 
had 128 kB address space, beeing a 16 bit machine.
it was to be redesigned with a larger address space.

While working in the National Research Labs, I ran a project to
make a synthesizable core, and together with my Manager, we made sure 
that National focused on IAR compilers for all parts.

ENEA could get an RTOS very quickly once needed.
My only problem was that they designed the core with 2 MB address
space,
When the "official" project started, they requested working samples 
within 2 months.
I still remember the expression on the VP of Microcontroller,
when he found out from the manager of the Architecture group
that they had been aware of the 4 MB address space requirement for 2 
years...

The ARM architecture was judged as almost, but not completely useless 
for mobile phones, and Ericsson selected the AVR.

ARM redesigned their core to include the Thumb instruction set.
At the same time, at National Semiconductor's request, (based on my 
studies :-) they also designed a synthesizable ARM core.
I do not think National ever used the core though.

Most other mobile phone vendors were using ARM-7.
Ericsson ran out of steam with the AVR around 2001 or so, and then
went for the ARM-9 and later as many others the Cortex-A series.

The first general purpose ARM microcontroller was the Atmel AT91M40400,
which I think was introduced around 1998.

BR
Ulf Samuelsson










BR
Ulf Samuelsson

2014-06-13 05:18, Przemek Klosowski skrev:
> On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 13:59:46 +0000, Michael Koenig wrote:
>
>> One thing a lot of people forget is that ARM was actually the first
>> commercial RISC processor. Yes, it was inspired by the work of the
>> Berkeley-RISC and Stanford-MIPS teams, but their commercial results,
>> namely SPARC and MIPS, came a little bit later.
>>
>
> Not quite: MIPS and RISC came out in 1983 and ARM-1 in 1985. Berkeley RISC
> did not really have a commercial followup, and of course MIPS was the
> target of the Hennesy Patterson book that implanted the RISC ideology in
> the industry.
>


Might remember wrong, but I think the SPARC is following the Berkley 
RISC approach.

BR
Ulf Samuelsson

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wrote:
> Another was a 3D spaceship game - IIRC, it was written in interpreted 
> Basic on the Archimedes, but it had a level of graphics you didn't 
> get in hand-coded assembly on PC's.

The game was Zarch by David Braben (of Elite fame), but the story about 
it being written in Basic is false. IIRC it had a loader written in 
Basic, which some journalists mistook for the game itself.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarch>

-a

Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2014-06-26, Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com> wrote:
>> David Brown wrote:
>> <snip>
>>>
>>> The x86 ISA is crap.  It was viewed as limited and old-fashioned the day
>>> it was created, and the IBM engineers designing the first PC wanted
>>> nothing to do with it (they picked the 68000).
>>
>>
>> I can't place the link, but everyone who touched the PC @ IBM was doomed
>> by it.
>>
>>>   But the chip was
>>> relatively cheap, and the 8-bit bus needed meant cheaper memory and main
>>> boards, so the PHB's pushed it as the cpu for the IBM PC.  Fast-forward
>>> to today and we have fantastic implementations of the same crap ISA.
>>
>>
>> For a while, PCI roamed the Earth. It's still around in forms.
>>
>> I'm not so sure that the original ISA bus wasn't the master stroke - it
>> provided for all those third-party peripherals. The various forms of PC
>> provided for doing systems integration at a then-lower cost. This was
>> a significant business model from say, 1985 until 1995 or so. Perhaps
>> even past that.
>>
>
> I think David meant ISA as in "Instruction Set Architecture", not the
> ISA bus.
>

Ah; my bad.

> I agree with him, BTW. :-)
>
> Simon.
>

-- 
Les Cargill

Op 27-Jun-14 13:50, David Brown schreef:
> On 26/06/14 21:57, rickman wrote:
> (Acorn and ARM were not alone in this respect, historically.  For
> example, the Commodore Amiga with its 68k processor was far faster, and
> had much better software, than PC's of the time.)

I don't know much about the Acorn, but the 68k on Amiga was assisted by 
blitters and such which did a lot of the heavy lifting and gave the 
impression of relativity fast system, whereas on PC of that era the 8086 
had to do most of the work all by itself. A 8 MHz 68K wasn't that fast, 
though it did have a much, much nicer instruction set than the 8086 and 
80286.

On 26/06/14 21:57, rickman wrote:
> On 6/26/2014 6:42 AM, Nobody wrote:
>> On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:24:22 +0200, David Brown wrote:
>>
>>> It was low-power and low-size from the beginning.
>>
>> A large part of this stems from having a shoe-string budget.
>>
>> The small size of the development team limited complexity. The
>> power consumption had to be kept below 1W so that a plastic package
>> could be used; a ceramic package would have cost more than the chip
>> itself.
>
> What processors at that time were cranking over 1 watt?  I recall lots
> of CPUs at that time with reasonable power levels.  The original ARM was
> no competition for a desktop type CPU like the x86.
>

On the first BBC Archimedes, one of the standard applications was a 
80286 emulator that could boot standard MS-DOS and run DOS applications. 
  It was a little slower than a real 80286 - but it was not 
significantly slower than a standard PC of two or three years earlier. 
That was just using a rather simple software emulator - when running 
native code, the ARM in the Archimedes rang rings round top-model PC's 
of the time.

One of the demonstration programs was a Mandelbrot set renderer - full 
screen (640 x 480 pixels) renderings took 7 seconds, while PC's took 
minutes to complete.  Another was a 3D spaceship game - IIRC, it was 
written in interpreted Basic on the Archimedes, but it had a level of 
graphics you didn't get in hand-coded assembly on PC's.  And the gui on 
the Archimedes had features like anti-aliased fonts and full window 
movement that were not seen on PC's until perhaps 8 years later.

Obviously these are best-case examples, and it is hard to do an 
apples-to-apples comparison of systems from 25 years ago, but I believe 
the early ARM chips completely outclassed the available x86 chips in 
pure processor speed.  And the Acorn software engineers and the RiscOS 
operating system completely outclassed anything MS (or Apple) could come 
up with.

(Acorn and ARM were not alone in this respect, historically.  For 
example, the Commodore Amiga with its 68k processor was far faster, and 
had much better software, than PC's of the time.)


> The real test of a CPU is the power for a given amount of work.  There
> should be a power oriented Dhrystone type test.  Measure the energy used
> while running the test and divide by the number of iterations in the
> test.  Joules per Dhrystone.
>
> But most processors spend a lot of time doing nothing waiting for
> something else to happen.  PCs are the worst.  Then the only thing that
> matters can be measured by a Watt meter.
>

rickman wrote:

> On 6/26/2014 6:42 AM, Nobody wrote:
>> On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:24:22 +0200, David Brown wrote:
>>
>>> It was low-power and low-size from the beginning.
>>
>> A large part of this stems from having a shoe-string budget.
>>
>> The small size of the development team limited complexity. The
>> power consumption had to be kept below 1W so that a plastic package
>> could be used; a ceramic package would have cost more than the chip
>> itself.
> 
> What processors at that time were cranking over 1 watt?  I recall lots
> of CPUs at that time with reasonable power levels.  The original ARM was
> no competition for a desktop type CPU like the x86.
> 
> The real test of a CPU is the power for a given amount of work.  There
> should be a power oriented Dhrystone type test.  Measure the energy used
> while running the test and divide by the number of iterations in the
> test.  Joules per Dhrystone.
> 
> But most processors spend a lot of time doing nothing waiting for
> something else to happen.  PCs are the worst.  Then the only thing that
> matters can be measured by a Watt meter.

But the newer one are waiting faster :-)

-- 
Reinhardt

On 6/26/2014 6:42 AM, Nobody wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 11:24:22 +0200, David Brown wrote:
>
>> It was low-power and low-size from the beginning.
>
> A large part of this stems from having a shoe-string budget.
>
> The small size of the development team limited complexity. The
> power consumption had to be kept below 1W so that a plastic package
> could be used; a ceramic package would have cost more than the chip itself.

What processors at that time were cranking over 1 watt?  I recall lots 
of CPUs at that time with reasonable power levels.  The original ARM was 
no competition for a desktop type CPU like the x86.

The real test of a CPU is the power for a given amount of work.  There 
should be a power oriented Dhrystone type test.  Measure the energy used 
while running the test and divide by the number of iterations in the 
test.  Joules per Dhrystone.

But most processors spend a lot of time doing nothing waiting for 
something else to happen.  PCs are the worst.  Then the only thing that 
matters can be measured by a Watt meter.

-- 

Rick