What is the difference between ARM architecture and the typical architecture in CPUs, and why is it so revolutionary?
In: Engineering
ARM is not that revolutionary, and have been around for almost 50 years. As an example, lots of early 2000 Nokia phones used ARM based processor.
ARM is chip architecture, which basically means a set of rules how software (like windows, iOS or Linux) can use the processor (hardware). The competing architecture is x86. ARM was originally designed to be “reduced” in complexity to be more power efficient, while x86 focused on pure performance. So untlil recently, ARM are the choice for low power, battery device (cell phone, smart gadgets etc.), while x86 dominate the field of PC, workstations and server. But recently ARM have evolved significantly (accelerated by the wide adoption and investment in smartphones in the 2010s) to the point that it can compete with x86 on performance, while still being energy efficient. So it now up to who rewrite their software to operate on ARM first and put it on a product. It’s not a easy task because you need to convince all the third parties also willing to rewrite their software to run on ARM. Apple did it successfully first on their computer line up (MacOS), and their computers (especially laptops) are now way ahead in terms of power efficiency than any of the x86 offerings.
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