ARM has been increasing its foothold of the SoC space since the appearance of early smartphones, and we can now see ARM cores used even in the personal computer to cloud computing space.
while there are many open source RISC architectures, ARM is still very popular and growing. what makes it such a popular architecture over other RISC architectures?
In: Engineering
a lot of it is licensing
x86 is too closed. only intel/amd can design new chips, so you’re stuck with whatever they make. because intel/amd have been in an arms race of performance they neglected efficiency so x86 is bad for phones. there have been x86 phones but their battery life was terrible
openRISC is too open. anyone can make their own purpose-built chips, but you have to share whatever design you come up with. that alone makes them a non-option for companies that feel compelled to hoard their “trade secrets”
ARM is a goldilocks zone for these companies. they give just about any company lots of freedom to design their own chips and little requirement to share anything. there are low-power ARM systems that barely use any electricity at all, and there’s apple’s M1 that competes with high-end x86 CPUs
of course there are other architectures between x86 and openRISC but they may have other shortcomings. for example, POWER licenses were expensive as fuck and given out sparingly before IBM open-sourced it
another advantage of ARM is that ARM Holdings made decent reference designs available for use. companies can design their own chips, but they can also just take stock ARM cores and throw them in their SoCs as-is
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