: How did ARM become so popular over other RISC architectures

Question

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

Answer 1

I would say the business model is a huge factor. If you want a custom SoC, ARM is a cheap way to do it. ARM sells an IP core (think the design), so you can configure and add stuff, and then send that off to a chip factory to make an SoC.

ARM runs Linux well, it’s got good performance, and unlike x86, you can get the chip customized.