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
Its not as simple as having an instruction set, you aren’t going to get anywhere with an open source instruction set if no one is making your chips to sell.
People continue using ARM cores these days because ARM is heavily documented and widely supported from compilers to software. Switching instruction sets, particularly to a completely new one with no support, comes with massive tech debt.
People originally used ARM because ARM was available, the ARM corporation sold its own chips and was willing to work with manufacturers, ARM soon partnered with Apple and was found some success there, though Apple was still in its slump (but Apple having a part in ARM’s creation would come back to benefit them). ARM was one of the first RISC instruction sets created, had CPUs sold by the company afterwards, and found its way into most phones even before the original iphone.
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